github - Change version file automatically on commit with git

Question

We have our master branch that we merge our features into. I need to be able to increment our version on commit/merge to the master automatically as a part of the merge. Is there a way i can do this so that the upped version is committed as a part of this commit without having to have an automatic 're checkout, change, commit' that will effectively double all our commits?

Answer 1

You can use git hooks for that.

The pre-commit hook specifically. You can create one from the sample in .git/hooks/pre-commit.sample by removing the .sample suffix and editing it. The content of pre-commit will be executed just before the commit.

It could contain something like this

#!/bin/sh
command-that-increases-version version.text
git add version.text

Any modification of version.text will then be included in the commit.

Finally some advice: you may want to avoid doing this altogether, since it may lead to a lot of merge conflicts when different branches store different values in version.text.