Mercurial has a built-in light-weight web server which can be used for browsing a repository with a web browser or for allowing remote machines to pull from you. To use it, simply run:
$ hg serve
And then point your web browser at http://localhost:8000/.
The built-in web server is missing some features found in other web servers, including access control, authentication, SSL, etc. These are especially useful if you want to be able to securely push to a web-based repository. Thus, if you want to make a more permanent server, you should probably use a [:CGIinstall:CGI-based server].
Following are detailed options for using hg's HTTP server: