auto-tag

ℹ️ About

Table of contents:

• 🚀 Purpose
• 🎛️ What it does
• 🎚️ Versioning sequence
• 💽 Pre-requisites
• 📚 Resources
• 🤔 Alternatives
  • Aliases
  • Reasons to use npm version
  • Reason to use AutoTag

🚀 Purpose

AutoTag can be used whenever you want to create a new tag in your git project.

Specify a level as major, minor or bug level as per the semvar sequence standard and AutoTag will increment the tag appropriately in your repo.

AutoTag streamlines your process as you no longer have to tasks that are error-prone or easy to forget.

🎛️ What it does

1. Fetch all tags on the remote.
2. Read your latest git tag
3. Figure out and show label for the next tag.
4. Actually create the tag, unless the preview flag is used.

Notes:

• The tag will be of type annotated.
• AutoTag was built to be run locally by hand, but you can add it as part of your release flow.

🎚️ Versioning sequence

This project is based on the Semantic Versioning standard, which you can read about on semver.org.

Here is the format:

vMAJOR.MINOR.BUG

A “bug” and “patch” release are the same thing.

If you are on version v0.1.2 and want to increment the minor version, run:

$ autotag m

Then the tool will increment the minor value by one and set the bug version to zero.

So your new tag will be v0.2.0.

Note this project is only intended for tag versions with a v prefix.

💽 Pre-requisites

Note this was written for Unix-like systems (Linux and macOS).

So you just need Bash shell installed.

The application is a single script. There are no external dependencies.

📚 Resources

Inspiration for this project comes from the following:

• Automatic tagging of releases
• A gist by dtiemann83.

🤔 Alternatives

Comparing AutoTag and the npm version command

If you’re already using Node.js and NPM and you have a package.json file in your project, you should not use AutoTag. AutoTag will actually give you an error if it can find a package.json file.

Rather use NPM CLI’s built-in npm version command - see Reasons to use npm version for why.

For example, to increment a minor version with NPM CLI:

$ npm version minor

Which is similar to running:

$ autotag m

Aliases

I like to configure aliases to make using npm version easier.

alias nv='npm version minor'
alias nv-M='npm version major'
alias nv-b='npm version patch'

Reasons to use npm version

• The NPM version command is built-in for NPM.
• It is widely known and used by dev community.
• It handles the same functionality as AutoTag does, in incrementing to major, minor or bug fix.
• It integrates with other parts of NPM running your preversion, version and postversion commands in your package.json file.
• It increments the version field in your package.json. This change requires a commit, which npm version does for you, using 0.2.0 for example as the commit message as v0.2.0 as the tag.

Reason to use AutoTag

AutoTag is great for repos in any programming language, especially those which don’t use NPM.

AutoTag makes sure to fetch remote tags first, which npm version does not. Which means npm version might end up creating a tag locally which already exists on the remote - created as a tag on GitHub directly. Unless one also remembers to edit package.json on GitHub before making the tag.

However, this risk can be avoided for NPM projects if you make sure to use a "version" field in your package.json file and avoid tagging in GitHub directly. This approach will work as if you have the latest master branch, as the value of the "version" field will reflect the latest tag on the remote master, even if you don’t have the tag locally.

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