autover

Automatic semantic versioning for your git project.

Installation

1. Download one of the latest releases, or compile it yourself using cargo build.
2. Run autover init in the repo that you want to start versioning in.
3. (Optionally) set your app version with autover set <version>
4. Push to remote!

How does it work?

autover is an app that calculates the version of your project using its git history, specifically by putting some data in the project's git notes.

It starts at 0.0.0 and counts up -- the initial commit is 0.0.0. If you want a different starting point, use autover set on the initial commit.

Since it uses git notes, you do need to push the notes refs. autover init sets your git config such that it will push

Usage

Restrictions

You can only make one change to the version per commit. To, for example, update the major version AND the release tag, you must use two seperate commits.

This may be changed in future, but has been omitted from this version for simplicity.

Getting the current version

Calling autover with no args will return the current version

$ autover
1.2.3-alpha

Manually setting the version

If you're using autover for the first time, and it's taking over versioning responsibilities from your team's humans, you probably already have a version number.

You can use autover set to tell autover to just start counting from that version.

$ autover set 1.2.3-alpha

Help

$ autover help
autover 
Laurence Pakenham-Smith <laurence@sourceless.org>
Automatic calculatable versions

USAGE:
    autover [OPTIONS] [SUBCOMMAND]

FLAGS:
    -h, --help       Prints help information
    -V, --version    Prints version information

OPTIONS:
    -c, --count-patch <COUNT_METHOD>    Choose the counting method from merge (default), commit, or manual.

SUBCOMMANDS:
    clear    Clear the current commit of any manual version changes
    fetch    Fetch version changes from the remote repository
    help     Prints this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)
    init     Set up repository to auto-push version changes
    major    Increments the major version
    minor    Increments the minor version
    patch    Increments the patch version (manual COUNT_METHOD only)
    push     Push version changes to the remote repository
    set      Override the current version
    tag      Set or clear the prerelease tag

Updating the version

Increment patch version

There's a few different ways to do this, two automatic and one manual.

Increment patch on merge commit (default)

By default, autover will increment the patch number when it sees a merge commit.

Caveat: naive merge commit counting

This means a merge commit from any branch -- once the merge commit is in master, autover cannot tell if it was a merge to master or a merge than happenned between two other branches.

Increment patch on non-merge commits

Invoking autover -c commit will tell autover to count regular commits (commits with a single parent) as patch increments.

Increment patches manually

$ autover patch
1.2.3-alpha -> 1.2.4-alpha

Increment minor version

$ autover minor
1.2.4-alpha -> 1.3.0-alpha

Increment major version

$ autover major
1.3.0-alpha -> 2.0.0-alpha

Change the tag

$ autover tag rc1
2.0.0-alpha -> 2.0.0-rc1

Clear the tag

$ autover tag
2.0.0-rc1 -> 2.0.0

Undoing changes to the current commit

$ autover clear

Other commands

Ensuring notes get fetched and pushed automatically

$ autover init

This command adds a couple of lines to .git/config which ensure that any git notes added by autover are pushed and fetched with your normal workflow. If you're having any problems with versions not updating on remote or not pulling them down, this is probably the issue.

Manually pushing/fetching version/notes

autover offers the fetch and push commands, if you need to fetch or push note refs manually, for instance during a ci run.

Caveats

Currently autover only supports one command per note (and thus per commit)

It also depends on a full git history being available, currently, so if you are using autover in ci and fetching with depth 0, then it will not function as expected.

Rationale

Why use git notes?

The original mvp of this app used markers in commits, but there were a few things that I didn't like about that approach:

• It leaves a lot of rubbish in commits
• It encourages people to make empty commits that do nothing but increment the version.