Is there a way to programmatically download a single file from a remote Mercurial repository, in Java? I have asked a very similar question regarding git; now I’m hoping I can do something similar with mercurial as well.
- I prefer a solution which uses as little bandwidth as possible, preferably only downloading that single file. I do not need to browse the repository, I already have the file’s path.
- I am not concerned with the history of the file, I only want its latest version.
- A solution that only prints the file to the output is great as well, of course – it doesn’t really have to save the file to disk, I can do that myself.
- I prefer a solution which does not depend on other applications (e.g. an installation of a mercurial client on the machine). A Java library which contains a mercurial client implementation itself would be optimal. However, I will happily invoke
hgif there’s no other way.
From what I understand about how Mercurial works – allowing working only against local repositories – this could prove to be problematic; but as I was able to do this with the similar Git SCM I’m hoping there’s a solution for Mercurial as well.
The mercurial wire protocol doesn’t have a command for reading a single file from a remote repository. That’s why the
hgcommand line client can’t do this either. The idea is that you should always make a local clone for such things.However, the various web interfaces for mercurial typically have a way to get at file content. For example, for bitbucket repositories the URL looks like this:
For the
hg serveweb interface, the URL looks like this: