Reducing repository size in Mercurial

Question

As my team works on a given project with the source in a Mercurial repository, the repository is obviously growing in size. As such, cloning a repository over the network become

Answer 1

If you only need the files in a given revision, but never need to examine history or make new commits, then downloading a snapshot can be faster.

The normal hgweb CGI script can provide a zip or tar file for any revision. The archives are generated on the fly. You only need to add

[web]
allow_archive = gz, zip, bz2

to your configuration file. You can then find archives under URLs like

http://server.com/repo/archive/rev.zip

Replace the revision number with the branch name it changeset hash you want Download the file with wget, curl, or a similar tool.

This strategy only pays off when the history is very large compared to the size of a single changeset.

This can be the case if the repository contains large files that change often. The largefiles extension can be an alternative here: it allows you to only download the files needed for the revision you checkout. That way you avoid downloading the history for big files and save significant amounts of bandwidth.