UnixInstall

Note: binary packages are available for most systems!

Prerequisites

Note: some Linux distributions fail to include bits of distutils by default, in which case you'll need python-dev to install. Suse 9.3 needs python-devel which is NOT on the DVD - download from Suse required. FreeBSD users please see the note below.

If your system does not ship with Python, install it first. Version 2.3 or greater is required. You'll also need a C compiler and a 3-way MergeProgram.

Building the documentation requires ASCIIDOC and XMLTO, the latter in turn requires XSLT. You may want to check your Linux distribution for these (and possibly others they make use of). If you don't want to build and install the documentations, substitute "make install-bin" and "make install-home-bin" for "make install" and "make install-home" below.

Unpacking the source

The necessary first step:

$ tar xvzf mercurial-<ver>.tar.gz
$ cd mercurial-<ver>

Per-user installation

To install in your home directory (~/bin and ~/lib, actually), run:

$ make install-home                     # add PYTHON=/path/to/python2.3-or-newer if necessary
$ export PYTHONPATH=${HOME}/lib/python  # bash syntax, ymmv
$ export PATH=${HOME}/bin:$PATH         # add these to your .bashrc

On some 64-bit systems (but not all), you'll need to use lib64 instead of lib in PYTHONPATH. The rule of thumb is that if /usr/lib64 exists, use lib64, otherwise lib. Besides being conservative for your own system, if you are putting up Mercurial to manage a web site or application that is being hosted for you by an ISP, this is likely the method which will least conflict with your host's environment.

System-wide installation

To install system-wide, you'll need root privileges.

$ make install

or if the default python is older than 2.3,

$ make install PYTHON=/path/to/python2.3

With this method, the addition of option PREFIX=/var/hg will keep the Mercurial libraries out of /usr and put them instead where the prefix specifies similar to the way that install-home above keeps Mercurial local to a user in the per-user-installation. The PYTHONPATH and PATH will also need to be appropriately adjusted if PREFIX option is used.

For instance, using Python 2.5, and with PREFIX=/var/hg, you will need to set PYTHONPATH as follows in your environment:

$ export PYTHONPATH=/var/hg/lib/python2.5/site-packages:${PYTHONPATH} # bash/ksh syntax

Alternatively, you can also create a wrapper script that sets the PYTHONPATH variable, regardless of the user's environment:

$ mv /var/hg/bin/hg /var/hg/bin/hg.py
$ cat > /var/hg/bin/hg <<\EOF
#!/bin/sh
PYTHONPATH=/var/hg/lib/python2.5/site-packages:${PYTHONPATH}
export PYTHONPATH
exec /var/hg/bin/hg.py "$@"
EOF

If PYTHONPATH is not correctly set, then hg debuginstall will print an error message that says:

ImportError: No module named mercurial

or

abort: couldn't find mercurial libraries in [...]
(check your install and PYTHONPATH)

Build directory installation

If you'd like to run development versions of Mercurial directly out of an hg repository, do:

$ make local

This will build Mercurial's extensions in-place. Then, simply symlink the hg script into a directory in your path.

Some notes on C compiler

The C compiler is used for compiling Mercurial's extensions written in C.

Sometimes, Python (actually distutils) may be calling a different C compiler (usually the one used for compiling Python itself) than the one installed on your system. In this case, you can try set the environment variable CC to tell Python to use your favorite C compiler.

With Python 2.4, you may want to set the environment variable LDSHARED for generating shared objects on some platforms.

Testing a new install

And finally:

$ hg debuginstall   # sanity-test the install
Checking encoding (UTF-8)...
Checking extensions...
Checking templates...
Checking patch...
Checking merge helper...
Checking commit editor...
Checking username...
No problems detected

If you get complaints about missing modules, you probably haven't set PYTHONPATH correctly.

Platform Notes

FreeBSD

FreeBSD provides the Ports System to easily install and manage applications. To install mercurial on FreeBSD, use the port (typically found in /usr/ports/devel/mercurial), or install and use the portinstall tool. Read Updating FreeBSD Ports to make certain you have the most recent ported version of mercurial and all dependent packages.

NetBSD

NetBSD's pkgsrc system provides a package for mercurial in pkgsrc/devel/mercurial. To install it, run:

$ cd /usr/pkgsrc/devel/mercurial
$ make install

See the pkgsrc documentation for more information on pkgsrc, and how to get, update and use it.

OS X

Source installation requires asciidoc and xmlto in order to build documentation. These are easy to install via fink or macports:

fink:

$ sudo apt-get install asciidoc xmlto # get the latest binary
$ fink install asciidoc xmlto # build from source

macports:

$ sudo port install asciidoc xmlto

Do one of these before building mercurial.

For some people on OS X 10.5, Mercurial fails to run with an error similar to the following:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/opt/local/bin/hg", line 18, in <module>
    mercurial.util.set_binary(fp)
  File "/opt/local/lib/python2.5/site-packages/mercurial/demandimport.py", line 74, in __getattribute__
    self._load()
  File "/opt/local/lib/python2.5/site-packages/mercurial/demandimport.py", line 46, in _load
    mod = _origimport(head, globals, locals)
  File "/opt/local/lib/python2.5/site-packages/mercurial/util.py", line 93, in <module>
    _encoding = locale.getlocale()[1]
  File "/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/locale.py", line 462, in getlocale
    return _parse_localename(localename)
  File "/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/locale.py", line 375, in _parse_localename
    raise ValueError, 'unknown locale: %s' % localename
ValueError: unknown locale: UTF-8

This appears to be due to the version of Terminal that comes with OS X 10.5 setting the value of the environment variable LC_CTYPE to a bad value, causing Python to throw. You can work around this problem either by going to Terminal > Preferences... > Settings and unchecking the option "Set LANG environment variable on startup", or else you can set the environment variables LC_ALL and LANG to appropriate values in your ~/.profile (e.g. add export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 and export LANG=en_US.UTF-8). For more information on the LC_* and LANG variables see man locale.

Ubuntu

In order to build mercurial on Ubuntu Dapper 6.06, it is first necessary to install gcc, the standard libraries, and the python header libraries. This can be done with the following command:

sudo apt-get install build-essential gcc python-dev

A system wide installation seems more reliable as Ubuntu does not read in .bashrc when invoked over ssh and cannot find per-user installed hg.

SUSE/SLES

In order to build the inotify hgext on SUSE/SLES you may have to edit _inotify.c and change the include line for inotify.h from:

#include <sys/inotify.h>

to:

#include <linux/inotify.h>

Solaris

Here's an example on installing Mercurial on Solaris 2.6 with ActiveState Python 2.4.1 (compiled with Sun CC) and GCC 2.95.3:

$ CC=gcc LDSHARED='gcc -G' python setup.py install

In our example, the -G option tells GCC to generate shared objects on Solaris, which is equivalent the -shared option on some other platforms. See GCC's manpage for more information on this.

- I installed it via make install-home, but I had to do some gcc calls myself (it didn't take -xarch and -x03). -ArneBab

Solaris 10 (Sparc)

Initially had some issues attempting to use the sunfreeware packages. The version of Python available from there didn't seem to have md5 enabled. Please note that I'm a bit of a novice with Solaris so if someone knows better then please ammend this note - MichaelAnthon

1. Ensure that the following packages are installed
   • SUNWopenssl-include
   • SUNWopenssl-libraries
   • SUNWzlib
   • SMCgcc and SMClgcc346 (I had to upgrade to the 3.4.6 version before it would compile cleanly)
2. Build python (using gcc from /usr/sfw and the Solaris assembler and linker from /usr/ccs and libraries from /usr/sfw/lib/, /usr/lib and /usr/local/lib)

   export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/sfw/lib/:/usr/lib:/usr/local/lib
   export PATH=$PATH:/usr/ccs/bin:/usr/sfw/bin
   ./configure --libdir=/usr/sfw/lib/ --libdir=/usr/lib --libdir=/usr/local/lib --includedir=/usr/sfw/include --includedir=/usr/include --includedir=/usr/local/include
   make
   make install (as root)

3. Install setuptools from http://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools ( at this point I had to make a symlink from /usr/bin/python to /usr/bin/python2.6, not sure if the python install SHOULD have done that for me)

4. Install Mercurial

   /usr/local/bin/easy_install -U mercurial

CategoryHowTo