Application auto build versioning

Question

Is it possible to increment a minor version number automatically each time a Go app is compiled?

I would like to set a version number inside my program, with an auto

Answer 1

I had trouble using the -ldflags parameter when building my mixed command-line app and library project, so I ended up using a Makefile target to generate a Go source file containing my app's version and the build date:

BUILD_DATE := `date +%Y-%m-%d\ %H:%M`
VERSIONFILE := cmd/myapp/version.go

gensrc:
    rm -f $(VERSIONFILE)
    @echo "package main" > $(VERSIONFILE)
    @echo "const (" >> $(VERSIONFILE)
    @echo "  VERSION = \"1.0\"" >> $(VERSIONFILE)
    @echo "  BUILD_DATE = \"$(BUILD_DATE)\"" >> $(VERSIONFILE)
    @echo ")" >> $(VERSIONFILE)

In my init() method, I do this:

flag.Usage = func() {
    fmt.Fprintf(os.Stderr, "%s version %s\n", os.Args[0], VERSION)
    fmt.Fprintf(os.Stderr, "built %s\n", BUILD_DATE)
    fmt.Fprintln(os.Stderr, "usage:")
    flag.PrintDefaults()
}

If you wanted an atomically-increasing build number instead of a build date, however, you would probably need to create a local file that contained the last build number. Your Makefile would read the file contents into a variable, increment it, insert it in the version.go file instead of the date, and write the new build number back to the file.