How can I get the current mercurial changeset revision not the hash

Question

I need to get the current mercurial changeset to return in a very simple webservice, just the incrementing revision number and not the hash. I know I can use

 hg --cwd C:\repos\MyRepo parent 

which will return me

changeset:   730:9d347e4a8d47 tag:         tip user:        Simon Martin <[email protected]> date:        Tue Jun 12 15:39:45 2012 +0100 summary:     Fixed defect #244... 

What I need though is just the 730 part of the changeset. The goal is to be able to write a very simple web service that will return that value - this will then be picked up by another application and displayed in the footer to give a quick reference as to which local revision is current. The testing process can then refer to that 'build' which can then be used to identify that.

Answer 1

You can show the local revision number of the working copy’s current parent using:

hg identify --num 

Note that this outputs a + suffix when there are local changes. Add an -r . option to avoid this.

You can use the -r option to get the local revision number for other revisions too. For example, to retrieve the ID of the last tagged ancestor:

hg id -n -r "ancestors(.) and tag()" 

Answer 2

You can use a custom template for the hg parent command.

This should get what you want:

hg parent --template "{rev}"