Well with further tests here are my conclusions:

With Apache hgweb and hgwebdir work flawlessly. I have 2 repositories published and they all work perfectly.

Now with nginx I have tested different cgi/fastcgi setups and kept the exact same nginx and mercurial configuration files, only the redirection to the correct cgi/fastcgi server was changed in the nginx.conf file (fatcgi_pass xxxxxxxxxxx)

1) Using this CGI setup: http://wiki.codemongers.com/NginxSimpleCGI Browsing with hgweb OK Browsing with hgwebdir was not tested Pushing through http crashes the socket.

2) Using this fastcgi setup: http://nginx.eu/nginx-fcgi.html Browsing with hgweb OK Browsing with hgwebdir doesn't show any repository and there is no CSS decoration Pushing through http returns "does not appear to be an hg repository". Pulling and cloning through http both work

3) Using the fasctgi setup that uses spawn-fcgi found on the mailing list with a spawn on 127.0.0.1:10008. The link: http://www.selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial/2007-August/014240.html Browsing with hgweb shows just as much as browsing with hgwebdir: no repository Browsing with hgwebdir shows no repository and no CSS decoration Pushing through http returns: "operation not supported over http" If I open a socket to connect to, I get in /var/log/nginx/error.log: "111: connection refused"

Therefore it seems that it is the fastcgi setup that is going wrong.

It's a shame that the Python via Flup/FastCGI/WSGI doesn't exist yet on the nginx documentation page.