Using Mercurial with Public Key Authentication on Windows

(note: this does not cover the server-side setup… See SharedSSH for more information – look especially at the hg-ssh script)

Grab the most recent version of TortoiseHG from http://bitbucket.org/tortoisehg/stable/downloads/ (the file should be named TortoiseHg-0.7.6-hg-1.2.1.exe or similar).

The install is straight forward - run the installer, keep clicking “next” until you're done. At this point you'll be asked to re-boot. Go ahead and do that, then continue on to the next step.

Head over to the TortoiseHG install directory. The simplest way to do that is to hit Start, Run, then enter “\Program Files\TortoiseHG\” and hit OK:

Once you're there, find and run the “PuttyGen.exe” application:

And hit the “Generate” button:

You'll be prompted to move your mouse around in the top portion of the application. Do that until the progress bar reaches the right side:

Congratulations! You're the proud new owner of a public/private key pair!

Before you go on, enter a “key comment” – this is used to keep track of what this key is for. Put in your name and your computer's description (for example, “David Wolever's laptop”).

When that's done, click the “Save public key” button and save the public key to your desktop (you'll need to send this key to someone in just a minute).

Finally click the “Save private key” button, and pick a safe place to keep this key (if someone steals it, very bad things will happen). I suggest putting it in “My Documents”:

Now it's time to send that public key (the one you saved to your desktop) to whoever it is that's running your server. Send them an email and attach the file – they will know what to do with it.

Done?

Ok, last step: setting up Putty.
Go back to the TortoiseHG install directory and run the “Putty.exe” application:

From the list on the left, drop down the “Connection” heading, the “SSH” heading and then click the “Auth” section. Click the “Browse” button and find the private key you saved in the last step (I suggested that you save it to My Documents):

Now scroll that list on the left back up and click the “Session” heading. Under “Host Name” enter your username@your hostname; for example, david@wolever.net. Then, under “Saved Sessions”, give this connection a name (only letters, please – no spaces or punctuation). For example, “SomeName”. When you're done, don't forget to click the “Save” button!

Let's check to make sure everything works.

Open up the \WINDOWS\Temp directory, then right click on the file list and chose TortoiseHG then Clone a Repository:

In the dialog that comes up, under Source Path enter ssh://SomeName/repo/path (where SomeName is the connection name you chose in the last step) and under Destination Path enter C:\WINDOWS\Temp\HGTest (or just click the “Browse” button then press Ok). Finally, click the “clone” button in the top left corner of the window:

If all is well, after a moment, the message [command completed successfully] should appear.

If not… Well, you're on your own. Sorry :(

To set up Eclipse, see Mercurial and Eclipse.