– You can see webbzr in action here

Latest changes

• Version 1.4 (Jun 30, 2010)Fixed a vulnerability where webbzr could be used to list content outside of the webbzr root.
• Version 1.3 (Jan 24, 2010) Branches and directories within branches can now be download as a tgz or tbz2 package straight from the bzr repository.
• Version 1.2 (Jan 21, 2010) Security fix (thanks to Andrew Bradley)
• Version 1.1 (Oct. 6 2009) Fix for repository that are not at the root of a url, for instance: http://www.site.com/~user/bzr/ (thanks to Dr. Rich Wareham)
• Version 1.0 (Aug. 5 2009) Initial version

Motivation

Bazaar (bzr) can push and pull branches on a remote server without having to install anything on the server side. This is useful in cases where you have access to a web server without admin privileges (i.e. you could not install WebDAV or setup a svn site). With bzr, you simply upload (sftp) your branch to a directory visible from your web page, and then people download (branch) using http.

Next step, I wanted to allow browsing of the branch from the web. This feature is “free” with svn through WebDAV, and there have been extra tools to browse svn and cvs (e.g. ViewVC). For bzr however, all I could find was LoggerHead which works as an actual web server. It has to start a daemon and open ports – pretty much defeating my initial motivation for using bzr.

I figured I’d just hack something quick.

webbzr

Features

webbzr is a php script that will:

• List the content of a directory and show normal and versioned files
• Allow browsing into the repository
• Allow viewing or downloading of files in the repository
• Allow downloading of branches or directories as a tgz/tbz2 package
• Allow browsing of revisions (going back in time)
• Display information about the last modifications

Files, not just directories, can be browsed by version. For example:

• http://bazaar.enseed.com/app/webbzr/.webbzr/webbzr.php
  grabs you the latest release of the file
• http://bazaar.enseed.com/app/webbzr/.webbzr/webbzr.php?rev=1
  would get you revision 1 of the file.

Hiding the Parameters from the URL

Using mod_rewrite, browsing is transparent (you can browse using the actual path in the url). For example, the link to http://bazaar.enseed.com/app/webbzr/ brings you straight into a branch. This is more convenient than using the equivalent url: http://bazaar.enseed.com/.webbzr/webbzr.php?path=app/webbzr/.

To make this possible without configuring the web server directly, we use a .htaccess file that redirects requests to the script:

This reads: given that the request uri does not start with a “.” (the script in stored in .webbzr/ to avoid recursive redirection), whatever the request was, pass it as an argument named path to webbzr.php.

Formatting the Output

The webbzr.php script actually outputs xml, not html. The xml is transformed on the client side with an xslt (webbzr.xsl) and styled with css (webbzr.css). That means you can change the look if without having to touch the php code at all.

Installing

1. Download

To download:

2. Configure

Move to webbzr/.webbzr:

In the config.php file you will have to edit the following variables:

• $BZRURL: this should be the url to the root of your web site (i.e. from where the script will run)
• $BZRBINARY: how to invoke bzr. This may simply be “bzr” if it’s in your path.
• $XSLABSOLUTEURL: absolute url to the webbzr.xsl file.
• $CSSABSOLUTEURL: absolute url to the webbzr.css file.

Move back to the webbzr directory (cd ..) and edit the .htaccess file. Next to the RewriteRule, make sure the url to the webbzr.php is fine. By default, it expects to be in /.webbzr/webbzr.php

3. Install

Copy the .htaccess file to the root of your browsing directory. Next to it, copy the .webbzr/ directory with the webbzr.php, config.php, webbzr.css, webbzr.xsl and the img/ directory.

4. Try it

And let me know if it works…