mercurial/help/urls.txt

Valid URLs are of the form::

  local/filesystem/path[#revision]
  file://local/filesystem/path[#revision]
  http://[user[:pass]@]host[:port]/[path][#revision]
  https://[user[:pass]@]host[:port]/[path][#revision]
  ssh://[user[:pass]@]host[:port]/[path][#revision]

Paths in the local filesystem can either point to Mercurial
repositories or to bundle files (as created by :hg:`bundle` or :hg:`
incoming --bundle`).

An optional identifier after # indicates a particular branch, tag, or
changeset to use from the remote repository. See also :hg:`help
revisions`.

Some features, such as pushing to http:// and https:// URLs are only
possible if the feature is explicitly enabled on the remote Mercurial
server.

Some notes about using SSH with Mercurial:

- SSH requires an accessible shell account on the destination machine
  and a copy of hg in the remote path or specified with as remotecmd.
- path is relative to the remote user's home directory by default. Use
  an extra slash at the start of a path to specify an absolute path::

    ssh://example.com//tmp/repository

- Mercurial doesn't use its own compression via SSH; the right thing
  to do is to configure it in your ~/.ssh/config, e.g.::

    Host *.mylocalnetwork.example.com
      Compression no
    Host *
      Compression yes

  Alternatively specify "ssh -C" as your ssh command in your
  configuration file or with the --ssh command line option.

These URLs can all be stored in your configuration file with path
aliases under the [paths] section like so::

  [paths]
  alias1 = URL1
  alias2 = URL2
  ...

You can then use the alias for any command that uses a URL (for
example :hg:`pull alias1` will be treated as :hg:`pull URL1`).

Two path aliases are special because they are used as defaults when
you do not provide the URL to a command:

default:
  When you create a repository with hg clone, the clone command saves
  the location of the source repository as the new repository's
  'default' path. This is then used when you omit path from push- and
  pull-like commands (including incoming and outgoing).

default-push:
  The push command will look for a path named 'default-push', and
  prefer it over 'default' if both are defined.