Push a Hg Repo to GitHub

So the scenario is thus: There is a project that I want to contribute to that is a Mercurial (Hg) repository (or ‘repo’ for short). I’ve taken a liking to Git; GitHub in particular with their new and beautiful Windows frontend. So how do I take a remote Hg repo and push it to GitHub. As follows (the following assumes you have a Ubuntu box available to play with, although I imagine many Linux machines would work the same way):

So first, create your repo on GitHub. You don’t have to do anything more with it at this time, just make a note of its name.
Next, add your machine’s RSA public key to GitHub. I won’t go through that here, but if you walk through GitHub’s setup steps for Linux, it will explain all of this.
Ok next, install Git and Mercurial:
```
$ sudo apt-get install git mercurial
```

Next, we install a little program that will link Mercurial to Git

$ sudo apt-get install python-setuptools
$ sudo easy_install hggit

Now, create a folder as needed (for example, an ‘hgrepo’ folder in your home folder)
```
$ cd ~
$ mkdir hgrepo
$ cd hgrepo
```

Now pull down the existing hg repo.

$ hg clone http://web.address.of.hp.repo/repo-name

I might make a subfolder and put your repo there. That’s alright. Move to that new directory.
```
$ cd new-hg-repo-folder
```
Now we’re going to add the info we need to push to GitHub
```
$ cd .hg`
```
Find a file named “hgrc”. Add the following lines:
```
[path]
git = git+ssh://git@github.com/your-username/your-new-github-repo.git

[extensions]
hggit =
```
There will probably be a line in there pointing to your original hg repo. It’s fine. Leave it there.
Now push your repo to GitHub!
```
$ hg push git
```

If everything worked right, your repo should now be available on GitHub!

One issue I didn’t address was contributor names. See the bottom of this page for an example of how to fix that.

This page on hg tip was also very helpful.

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