Versioning utilities

One of the most difficult tasks is to automatically and uniquely version command-line utilities, especially when using a CI/CD system. This section presents a technique that uses a GitHub value to version a command-line utility on your local machine.

You can apply the same technique to GitLab—just search for the available GitLab variables and values and choose one that fits your needs.

This technique is used by both the docker and kubectl utilities, among others:

$ docker version
Client: Docker Engine - Community
 Cloud integration: 1.0.4
 Version:           20.10.0
 API version:       1.41
 Go version:        go1.13.15
 Git commit:        7287ab3
 Built:             Tue Dec  8 18:55:43 2020
 OS/Arch:           darwin/amd64
...

The previous output shows that docker uses the Git commit value for versioning—we are going to use a slightly different value that is longer than the one used by docker.

The utility that...