Must be root to push/commit to mercurial repositories

Question

I am using Ubuntu on my workstation and whenever I try to commit/push to a Mercurial repository located on a CIFS share in my LAN, I get this error thrown: abort: Operation not permitted: /media/repos/myRepo/.hg/journal.dirstate

However, prepending any command that causes this with sudo, will let mercurial continue without throwing any errors at me.

What should I do stop having to sudo every commit?

Answer 1

Your user doesn’t have write permissions for /media/repos/myRepo. You can check the owner and permissions using ls -la. Depending on the result of that you should either:

Try changing the permissions with chmod to allow access by your user or group.

sudo chmod -R ug+w /media/repos/myRepo

(ug+w means add write permissions for the group and the owner user, this will work if you’re in the same group as the owner. Otherwise, you could try just +w which will add it for all users, but this is less secure.)

Try changing the owner with chown to your user or group.

sudo chown -R <myuser>:<mygroup> /media/repos/myRepo

(Both myuser and mygroup are optional)

Also be sure to use chown and chmod recursively on the entire repository. If journal.dirstate is recreated every time (which I think is what happens), it inherits its permissions from the .hg directory, so any permissions you change on the file itself may get lost.