SimpleVersion

SimpleVersion aims to simplify how you version the artifacts of your git repository.

Using SimpleVersion you can generate consistent, expected version numbers for each commit in your repository, based on a few simple configuration options.

SimpleVersion uses some base configuration and the 'height' of your commit history to generate a version. Height is calculated as the number of commits since the last change to the .simpleversion.json file.

Important

You must commit changes to the file for SimpleVersion to identify the change.

Future versions of SimpleVersion aim to provide:

• Validation of the version based on branch configuration
• Custom formatting configuration to support custom versioning schemes
• Override logic with custom token replacement syntax
• and more!

Why?

SimpleVersion borrows ideas from other excellent versioning tools, notably: GitVersion and NerdBank.GitVersioning. These tools also deliver the ability to version your repository based on the commits but work in a different manner:

• GitVersion relies heavily on branch names, merge messages and more. I have found this can sometimes cause issues without extreme management of best practices.
• Nerdbank is an excellent tool that removes many of the issues I ran into with GitVersion, however is more limited in scope for custom labelling formats.

Usage

To use SimpleVersion, you simply need to add a .simpleversion.json file to the root of your git repository and commit it.

Configuration

{
  "version": "0.1.0",
  "label": [ "alpha2" ],
  "branches": {
    "release": [
      "^refs/heads/master$",
      "^refs/heads/preview/.+$",
      "^refs/heads/release/.+$"
    ]
  }
}

The above configuration tells SimpleVersion that the version will be 0.1.0 and should have a release label of alpha2. As there is a pre-release label, the height will be appended to label, generating a Semver2 version 0.1.0-alpha2.3 if there were three commits since the version was last set.

For further guidance, see the configuration documentation.

Resetting The Height

The height will be reset to 0 when SimpleVersion detects a change to either the version or the label in the .simpleversion.json file.