So now we need to configure phphgadmin so it will work with our Mercurial server. lets start by editing the configuration file.

sudo vi /var/www/wordpress/admin/application/config/phphgadmin.php

There are quite a few edits that we need to do to this file to get everything working. First we need to set the base URL so find the line starting $config[‘base_url’] and set the value to something like

$config[‘base_url’] = “http://yourserver/admin/”

When you create a new repository your can have a number of default values preset by changing the following lines. I suggest setting allowpull to ‘true’ to allow people to clone the repositories and push_ssl to false to allow contributors to push changes to the repository over http. the allow_read should be set to * to allow anybody, including anonymous, to clone the repository and the allow_push can either be * to allow all authenticated users push changes back up to the repository or you can put in usernames to restrict it to specific people.

At this stage we now have a fully functioning Mercurial server but we have not created any repositories yet. A repository is where you sync your source code to, you need one for each application/NSF that you’ll be building. We could create them manually using the ‘hg init’ command but if you have a lot of projects then this can become a tedious process of having to log into the server every time somebody needs a new repository. Instead I’m going to install phpHGAdmin. It’s a PHP based management system for Mercurial. This step in the process is a little complex but once it’s complete you’ll find managing the system will be a lot easier.

First off we need to download the phpHGAdmin software. The command below will download the version current at the time of writing this entry but if it dosen’t work then you can find the latest version on https://bitbucket.org/joshjcarrier/phphgadmin/downloads and substitute the newer url in the command.

wget https://bitbucket.org/joshjcarrier/phphgadmin/downloads/phphgadmin-1.1.20100623.zip

Once it has downloaded we can unzip it using the unzip command. The unzip command if not installed by default on Ubuntu Server so before we can unzip the software we’ll need to install unzip.

sudo unzip phphgadmin-1.1.20100623.zip -d /var/www

The files have been unzipped into the /var/www folder and now we need to make Apache aware of the new folder and setup a couple of special Apache settings. Lets edit the /etc/apache2/sites-available/default file again and add in some special directives for phphgadmin.

sudo vi /etc/apache2/sites-available/default

and add the following lines below the section just above the ScriptAlias line, replace the ‘username’ in the ‘require user username’ line with the username of the person you want to have administrative rights to the system.

AllowOverride All
order deny,allow
allow from all

AuthBasicProvider ldap
AuthType Basic
AuthzLDAPAuthoritative off
AuthName “Mercurial Server”
require user username
AuthLDAPURL “ldap://yourserver.com:389/O=YourOrg?CN?sub?(objectClass=*)” NONE

Save the file once you are done. Before we restart Apache we need to enable the rewrite module. Here’s the command to turn that module on and then restart Apache.

sudo a2enmod rewrite
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

At this stage Apache knows about the PHGHGAdmin application but if you go to http://yourserver/admin you will get an error message as we still have to configure the application. I’ll show you how to do this in the next part.

Now that we have our Apache server with Mercurial up and running its time to secure it. We are going to do this using LDAP pointing to our Domino server so make sure your running LDAP on your Domino server before going any further. Once you know your LDAP server is working fine go back to your Ubuntu server and edit the Apache default site with the following command ( again you can use pico in place of vi if you wish )

sudo vi /etc/apache2/sites-available/default

Find the group of lines that start with and add these lines into that group

AuthBasicProvider ldap
AuthType Basic
AuthzLDAPAuthoritative off
AuthName “Mercurial Server”
require valid-user
AuthLDAPURL “ldap://yourserver.com:389/O=YourOrg?CN?sub?(objectClass=*)” NONE

In the AuthLDAPURL line make sure you change it to use your LDAP server and root org. This particular LDAP setup uses the Common Name for the login user name. If you want to change it to shortname or email address you can adjust the CN part of the LDAP setup. Once you have made the changes go ahead and save the file.

We now need to enable the LDAP module in Apache and then restart the Apache server.

sudo a2enmod ldap
sudo a2enmod authnz_ldap
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Now if you try to hit your Apache/Mercurial server using your web browser you should get prompted for a username and password. Try entering something that is not in your Domino Directory and the login should fail. Then try entering in something that is in your Domino Directory and you should be able to hit the Mercurial repositories list. If you have used CN for the login name as in the example above then dont forget you need to use the full common name like ‘Declan Sciolla-Lynch’ as the user name or the login will fail.

If everything is working then congratulations. You now have a Source Control Management server using Mercurial that is setup to use Domino LDAP as your authentication point…

But we are not finished yet. In the next few parts we will install a handy tool called phpHGAdmin which will make creating new Mercurial repositories on your server easier then having to learn Hg commands and having to edit the hgweb.config file manually all the time.