Integrating auto with bump2version

2021-02-11T00:00:00-05:00

auto by Intuit lets you set up automatic creation of tags & releases and population of changelogs in a GitHub project. It takes care of determining the version number for new releases, but, by default, it does not set the new version number in your code. This isn’t a problem if your project uses something like setuptools_scm or versioneer to fetch the version number from Git, but if your project’s version number is hardcoded in your code, you’ll need another solution. bump2version is that solution, and it can be integrated into auto as follows.

Set up `bump2version`

To make your project’s repository usable with bump2version, create a .bumpversion.cfg (no “2”!) file as follows:

[bumpversion]
# Replace the value here with your project's current version number:
current_version = 0.1.0

commit = True

# If integrating with GitHub Actions, you'll need to include "[skip ci]" in
# the bump2version commit message in order to prevent auto from running
# unnecessarily:
message = [skip ci] Bump version: {current_version} → {new_version}

# auto will be taking care of the tagging for us, so set `tag` to False:
tag = False

# For each file in your code that contains your project's version number,
# add a `[bumpversion:file:PATH]` section header, like so:
[bumpversion:file:src/myproject/__init__.py]

With this file in place and bump2version installed, you can automatically update your project’s version number by running bump2version $PART, where $PART is the part of the version number to increase (major, minor, or patch).

See the bump2version documentation for more information.

Integrate with `auto`

I assume you’ve already set up auto for your repository. To get auto to run bump2version automatically at the right time when creating a new release, use the exec plugin to register an afterChangelog hook. Add the following to the "plugins" field in your repository’s .autorc file:

{
    ...
    "plugins": [
        ...
        [
            "exec",
            {
                "afterChangelog": "bump2version \"$(printf '%s\n' \"$ARG_0\" | jq -r .bump)\""
            }
        ]
    ]
}

Tip

Despite what the exec documentation may imply, the $ARG_0 environment variable is a JSON object containing the payload passed to the respective hook. This means we must extract the semantic version part to bump using jq.

Warning

Do not use echo in place of printf here! The $ARG_0 variable contains JSON containing strings with \n escape sequences, which echo would convert into newlines, resulting in invalid JSON.

With this setting in place, auto will run bump2version on each new release after populating the changelog, and the commit created by bump2version will be the commit to receive the new version tag.

Integrate with GitHub Actions

Assuming you’ve already set up a GitHub Actions workflow for running auto (see here for an example), the only addition needed to support bump2version is to install it before running auto:

- name: Set up Python
  uses: actions/setup-python@v2
  with:
    python-version: '^3.6'

- name: Install bump2version
  run: python -m pip install bump2version

Knowledge Bits - bump2version

Integrating auto with bump2version

Set up bump2version

Integrate with auto

Integrate with GitHub Actions

Set up `bump2version`

Integrate with `auto`