Ninth Division [9D]

I have had a lot questions on how we have been working lately.  After doing an article for Uses This:  Silicon Prairie Edition, I thought it was time to update everyone on a few changes on our development process.  While using GitHub.com for development isn’t anything new, seems like how we use is (even if [...]

As you know we made the switch to Mercurial. We will continue to write some of the stories about this move. First up is updating any of the web apps we have. We don’t have many web apps which we built for clients, since we mostly do iOS/Mac development. Those that we do have are built using Ruby on Rails and all have Capistrano deployment scripts. All those Capistrano scripts were for subversion originally; time to move it to Mercurial.

We are on BitBucket!

By now, you know we are moving to Mercurial to manage all of our source code. Yesterday I told you about why Mercurial is the right fit for us. In that article I made mention of BitBucket.

The last year or two has passed by and everyone has been talking a lot about git and tons of developers are using github.com. At first, I was thinking it was a fad. Then more time passes and it becomes clear the fad had passed as it turns out we were missing out on how great Distributed Version Control Systems are; which git is one of them.

Instead of jumping in and assuming git was the only way to go, I wanted to better understand Mercurial too. Mercurial is often mentioned when compared to git and I just stumbled on it when looking at how to host git repositories. Many people I have talked with haven’t even heard of Mercurial; in part because Mercurial doesn’t have github.com and its not marketed much. After plenty of time with both of them we are moving from Subversion to Mercurial.

Mercurial is awesome! As a friend told me, “it’s the bee’s knees.” This blog post isn’t to talk about what makes mercurial so great though. I am focusing on one of the hardest to find sets (or at least updated) of information out there: hosting mercurial yourself over http.

All the books/posts/wikis talk about how easy it is to host Mercurial yourself, but there wasn’t much on HOWTOs. Or if there were, they were quite out of date and I figured those methods were no longer working. Come to find out they do work and after getting it going on our Mac OSX Dev Server I was left thinking “oh, thats all it took to setup?”

Click through to read more!

We are on GitHub now.