Injecting current git commit id into Java webapp

Question

We have a git repository which contains source for a few related Java WARs and JARs. It would be nice if the Java code could somehow:

System.err.println(\"I          


        

Answer 1

You can get the last commit SHA with

git rev-parse HEAD

but it's generally a lot more useful to use

git describe

which will give you something that looks like this:

v0.7.0-185-g83e38c7

This works if you have tags - it will tell you how many commits from the last valid tag your current checkout is at plus a partial SHA for that commit, so you can use it to base a checkout off of later. You can use this identifier just like a SHA in most circumstances, but it's much more human readable.