Maintain your program versions entirely within git. No local files required! All versioning information is stored using git tags.

This gem contains a command-line tool and set of Rake tasks to increment and display your version numbers via git tags, and some associated Ruby code to use inside a gemspec or your program to retrieve the current version number, for use in builds and at runtime.

Most of your day-to-day usage of git-version-bump will be via the command line. When you bump a version, a new tag will be created representing the newly incremented version number at the current commit. If no tags currently exist, the previous version will be taken to be 0.0.0 and then incremented accordingly.

Pretty damned trivial:

git version-bump <major|minor|patch|show>

You can also shorten the specifier to any unique substring:

git version-bump ma
git version-bump mi
git version-bump p
git version-bump s

I recommend adding an alias to your ~/.gitconfig file, for less typing:

[alias]
    vb = version-bump

You can also add your own release notes to your release tags, by using the -n (or --notes, if you like typing) option:

git version-bump -n minor

This will open an editor, containing a list of the commits since the last release tag, in which you can type your release notes. If you follow standard git commit style (a "heading" line, then a blank line, followed by free-form text) you're perfectly positioned to use github-release to make gorgeous-looking release announcements to Github.

If you'd like to have access to the version-bumping goodness via rake, add the following line to your Rakefile:

require 'git-version-bump/rake-tasks'

You will now have the following rake tasks available:

rake version:bump:major  # bump major version (x.y.z -> x+1.0.0)
rake version:bump:minor  # bump minor version (x.y.z -> x.y+1.0)
rake version:bump:patch  # bump patch version (x.y.z -> x.y.z+1)
rake version:bump:show   # Print current version number

(Since version:bump:major is a lot of typing, there are also shortcuts: v:b:major, v:b:maj, v:b:minor, v:b:min, v:b:patch, v:b:pat, and v:b:p)

To get access to this version information in your code (such as in your gemspec, or the definition of a ::VERSION constant), you can require 'git-version-bump' and use the following methods:

GVB.version            # Return the entire version string
GVB.major_version      # Return just the 'major' portion of the version
GVB.minor_version      # Return just the 'minor' portion of the version
GVB.patch_version      # Return just the 'patch' portion of the version
GVB.internal_revision  # Return "internal revision" information, or nil
GVB.date               # Return the date of the most recent commit, or
                       # today's date if the tree is dirty

The "internal revision" is set when the tree is dirty, or when the latest git commit doesn't correspond with a tag. In that case, the internal revision will describe, in the manner of git describe, the full details of the version of the code in use. This information will be part of the version string provided by gvb_version.

If any of these methods are called when there isn't a tag or other version information available, the version will be assumed to be 0.0.0.1.ENOTAG with a date of 1970-01-01.

Typically, you want to encode your version and commit date into your gemspec, like this:

Gem::Specification.new do |s|
  s.version = GVB.version
  s.date    = GVB.date

  ...
end

The beauty of this method is that whenever you run a rake build, you'll get a gem which is accurately versioned for the current state of your repository. No more wondering if the foobar-1.2.3 gem installed on your system was built from pristine sources, or with that experimental patch you were trying out...

If, like me, you're one of those people who likes to be able to easily see what version of a library you're running, then you probably like to define a VERSION constant somewhere in your gem's namespace. That, too, is simple to do:

require 'git-version-bump'

class Foobar
  VERSION = GVB.version
end

This will work correctly inside your git tree, and also in your installed gem. Magical!

If you are using GitHub releases for your project or some other method that involves light tags (tags with no annotations), you might notice that these tags are not detected by git-version-bump by default. If you want these commits to be detected then use the following configuration:

require 'git-version-bump'

class Foobar
  # First parameter is use_local_git, second is include_lite_tags
  VERSION = GVB.version(false, true)
end

In very rare circumstances, while running in a git repo, you may wish to explicitly set the version or date returned by GVB.version or GVB.date, respectively. This can be done by setting the repo's versionBump.versionOverride or versionBump.dateOverride config values, like so:

git config versionBump.versionOverride 1.2.3
git config versionBump.dateOverride 1970-01-01

Note that whatever you set those values to is used without validity checking; if you set it to something weird, you'll get weird results.

Send your pull requests to the Github repo, or send patches to theshed+git-version-bump@hezmatt.org. Bug reports can be sent to the same place, although I greatly prefer patches.

Unless otherwise specified, all code in this repository is licenced under the terms of the GNU Public Licence, version 3, as published by the Free Software Foundation. The full terms of this licence can be found in the file LICENCE.