Mercurial: remote: abort: There is no Mercurial repository here (.hg not found)!

Question

all,

I have searched for this problem for long time and tried different methods.

I want to maintain my code on the server through only SSH. But when I run this:

sudo hg clone -v ssh://carl@hostname//home/carl/Java/Projects/peta/

Mercurial keeps telling me remote: abort: There is no Mercurial repository here (.hg not found)!. Some articles said that the path should be correct and there should be a .hg directory there. But I have checked it for several times and I am sure there is a .hg folder at the right place.

I also tried

hg --config ui.remotecmd=/usr/bin/hg clone ssh://carl@hostname//home/carl/Java/Projects/peta/

But it failed as well. What other problem it could be? Thanks.

---

Solved

I finally fix the problem. Previously, I create a repository on my local machine, and scp all files (including .hg) on to the server. I try to remove .hg directory first, and create a repo on the server through ssh (hg init). Then hg clone works!

Answer 1

Extraction from hg help urls

Some notes about using SSH with Mercurial:

• SSH requires an accessible shell account on the destination machine and a copy of hg in the remote path or specified with as remotecmd.

• path is relative to the remote user's home directory by default. Use an extra slash at the start of a path to specify an absolute path:

  ssh://example.com//tmp/repository

this means, at least, that you can't use the same URI and change only one/two slash it it: at least one path will be non-existent.

Consequence of the quote and error message: you must to debug (with any ssh-tool) and find correct path to needed directory. you can:

• use scp (f.e) and copy known file from known location
• SSH into remote host in interactive session and verify path (both?) by hand, i.e: ssh ..., cd ..., pwd, verify output of pwd
• ... any other debugger

When you'll get good path after login, you have to check next point of failure - .hg dir permissions

After verification of these checkpoints you'll get clone and some bonus in the form of understanding "What happened before"

HTH