Setup your Bitbucket replacement for your Mercurial repository

A long time ago the German DelphiPraxis community convinced me to abandon my previous strategy of saving my source code via zipping only and use a source code management system.

So I googled a little bit and found SVN.

After some days of getting used to it - I proudly announced: "I have switched to SVN"! And with that, the shit storm has begun.

Why aren't you using a distributed revision-control-system? Don't use this old SVN system! Uses Mercurial or Git!

So I took the first "Mercurial" and with a little help and a talk from MVP Uwe Raabe on one of the Delphi-Tage-Event,  I had to realize that this system "just" works very well and offers all the advantages I missed in SVN. ( Sorry Craig )

Pushing everything for backup to a network-driver or a USB-Stick works perfectly. So no need for the old SVN Server installation on my local server, because mercurial is file-based. But after some time I had to share my source code with other developers and here comes BitBucket into play.

The use of BitBucket was as easy as Mercurial itself. 

I've never used Git, but I was told that it was just like Mercurial. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Even the first time I used git, there were big differences and I immediately hated git. But this was not a big deal, because I could use Mercurial for my local repositories and use Git for sharing where necessary.

I know many more developers using Git that Mercurial, but I never got used to the remote and local heads for different users and the parallel branches are show differently comparing to Mercurial.

After Bitbucket broke away from Mercurial repositories and hg is no longer supported, I had to find an alternative.  After some testing, I was able to run the SCMManager on a virtual Ubuntu installation. With the online available tutorials, the installation was not complicated. Unfortunately, SSL did not work out of the box.

The SCMManager is a Java-Client and this is not so easy with the certbot for Let's Encrypt. As far as I know, you have to convert the certificates and install them into the java key store. I like the cronjob based renewal, so hand converting was not my goal.

I found a little hint, that the Nginx server could be used as a proxy server to do the https/SSL connection and leave the java installation without any changes.

Installing software on Linux with this apt-get stuff is really easy and I wish this kind of installation would also possible on Windows. One drawback often is the location or the necessary changes to config files by hand. In this case, I had to type the config file from scratch.

By adding a new A record to the nameserver I was able to run the certbot with the "--nginx" param script who not only installed the certificate but also added the necessary parameters to my handwritten config file. Well done - this kind of "service" is really nice...

With some tweaking and some reload/retries, the server was reachable over https!

Small repositories worked immediately, but large files could not be transferred and caused an hg error: "request entity too large". The reason for this problem could only be the installed proxy server because everything worked before. But also this problem could be solved by a little googling. 

So now I have my own Mercurial server. If you want to know more about this, please write this in the comments, then I will try to collect my google knowledge into another post.