As a developer,
I want to display the source version of my app
so that the team can refer to it for QA.
When you push your source to Heroku, the repo is used for slug compilation and then purged before the app is deployed. Unfortunately this prevents you from using something like the following in your app code:
version = `git rev-parse --short HEAD`
So, let's capture the information during slug compilation. Heroku provides the SOURCE_VERSION environment variable as a nice SCM-agnostic way to do this. We can use a buildpack to create a profile.d script that will export SOURCE_VERSION into the app runtime environment.
First thing, add the buildpack to your app:
$ heroku buildpacks:add https://github.com/ianpurvis/heroku-buildpack-version
During your next deployment, the buildpack will generate the environment configuration script:
-----> Fetching custom git buildpack... done
-----> Source app detected
-----> Creating profile.d script
SOURCE_VERSION: d9f63da90bc76ee878a0e9a54d9e85db7da4a52b
Script installed to .profile.d/source_version.sh
The script itself is simple, just a single export statement with default expansion:
export SOURCE_VERSION=${SOURCE_VERSION:-f5efc0615dbd0f64f718e142bad858b8e1cf59bb}
Note the expansion syntax ':-' ensures that any existing value is not overidden.
In dev environments, scripting git rev-parse is still probably the most convenient way to get your current source version. For easy portablity, you can cascade the initialization:
version = ENV['SOURCE_VERSION'] || `git rev-parse HEAD`.presence || '1.0'
The pack is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.
