Mercurial allows for tying in keyring configuration for those of us who do not want to store passwords in plain-text in our .hgrc files or constantly using SSH.

First install the Python keyring library by running pip install keyring. After that is installed, checkout Mercurial keyring repository and add to $HOME/.hgrc the following:

[extensions]
mercurial_keyring = ~/path/to/mercurial_keyring/mercurial_keyring.py

Next up, configure your repositories, e.g. in the case of Bitbucket I use:

[auth]
bitbucket.prefix = bitbucket.org/asmodai
bitbucket.username = asmodai
bitbucket.schemes = https

Mercurial keyring will automatically decide on the best keyring to use. On a FreeBSD system with no Gnome or other systems providing a keyring, if you do not specify a specific keyring, the system will use the file ~/.local/share/python_keyring/keyring_pass.cfg. This keyring file stores the passwords encoded in Base64 in plain-text. This is not quite what you would want from a security point of view. You can configure which backend store to use by editing $HOME/.local/share/python-keyring/keyringrc.cfg. To get a plain-text file with encrypted keys use the following configuration:

[backend]
default-keyring=keyring.backend.CryptedFileKeyring

This will create the file ~/.local/share/python-keyring/crypted_pass.cfg after initializing the backend store with a password. Look at the documentation for keyring on what other configuration options are available.

Note: make sure the PyCrypto dependency is installed with the _fastmath module. This in turn depends on the gmp library.