How to version my app

[alleroux]

I'm using git flow. I name my releases by version number. For example v1.02. I'd like to be able to run a git command: git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD to get the current branch. Then parse out the version number from the branch and stick that into my page somewhere. What would be the best way to do that?

[heyimalex]

You could make a script that reads the version, then calls react-scripts build with an environment variable set to it. In development mode it could just be a placeholder set in your dotenv.

[peterbe]

Do you mean you want the current version number rendered into the HTML?
If so I would suggest you do that with your web server. For example, when you start your Python/Ruby/Go server, you call out to that git rev-parse ... command and load that into memory, then upon rendering the index.html you make a string replacement.

Alternatively, you can do something like this during build:

# First add '<!-- version: %VERSION% -->' to your public/index.html file
$ yarn run build
$ VERSION=`git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD`
$ sed -i -- "s/%VERSION%/$VERSION/g" build/index.html

Now your build/index.html should contain <!-- version: name-of-the-current-branch -->.

[peterbe]

Also, see the ideas on #2466 where they use the version in the package.json file. Not sure if that's relevant to you.

[Timer]

I'll close this as answered.

[uidevperson]

@peterbe (apologies for asking on a closed issue) for #2466 do you happen to know of any implementation example of this? #2466 is locked so I cannot ask for an example on how to inject your git version into the index.html :)

[peterbe]

@uidevperson There are many different UNIX* ways to do this. What you ultimately need to do is figure out the version of the app and make this string available as an environment variable before running yarn run build. E.g.

REACT_APP_CURRENT_GIT_SHA=`git rev-parse --short HEAD` yarn run build

The other option, as mentioned above is to inject it into the built build/index.html in some way.