Conventional Semver

A successful company is able to provide a monetised solution to a user’s problem. That seems easy enough, but how do you know whether you’re building what your users want? I believe we figure this out by asking them, meaning that the sooner we can put something in the hands of our users, the sooner we will know whether we’re on the right track or not.

This is why I am a big proponent of trunk-based development; the way-of-working that emphasises fast integration to a shared branch. If everyone in your organisation strive to make it easy to deliver new versions of your product to your users, you will get an answer to the above question sooner.

I have helped several organisations “work trunk-based” over the past couple of years, but I have always had to reinvent the wheel when it comes to the tooling used for automating the versioning of the product.

Now, there’s a tool for that!

Conventional Semver is a small Python CLI which takes a SemVer tag and a Conventional Commit message as input, and returns “the next version”. Both SemVer and CC messages are well described by their respective standards – and the only thing my tool does is glue together existing parsing libraries – but finally I don’t have to rewrite the same scripts for every new assignment!

The tool is FOSS and available on PyPi. You’re more than welcome to use it and contribute!

Usage

The README.md on GitHub contains all the info you need, I hope, but here’s the gist.

$> pip install conventional_semver

# If your latest tag is 1.7.2 and
# your latest commit message "feat: add new shiny thing"
$> conventional_semver \
  --semver "$(git describe --abbrev=0 --tags)" \
  "$(git log -1 --pretty=%B | tr -d '')"

1.8.0

# Or, doing everything manually:
$> conventional_semver --semver 1.7.2 "feat: add new shiny thing"

1.8.0

But there’s more!

I have created a dotnet sample project where you can see the CLI in action.