Automatic version number both in setup.py (setuptools) AND source code?

Question

SITUATION:

I have a python library, which is controlled by git, and bundled with distutils/setuptools. And I want to automatically generate version

Answer 1

As was mentioned in another answer, this is related to the release process and not to the development process, as such it is not a git issue in itself, but more how is your release work process.

A very simple variant is to use this:

python setup.py egg_info -b ".`date '+%Y%m%d'`git`git rev-parse --short HEAD`" build sdist

The portion between the quotes is up for customization, however I tried to follow the typical Fedora/RedHat package names.

Of note, even if egg_info implies relation to .egg, actually it's used through the toolchain, for example for bdist_wheel as well and has to be specified in the beginning.

In general, your pre-release and post-release versions should live outside setup.py or any type of import version.py. The topic about versioning and egg_info is covered in detail here.

Example:

• v1.3.4dev.20200813gitabcdef0
• The v1.3.4 is in setup.py or any other variation you would like
• The dev and 20200813gitabcdef0 is generated during the build process (example above)
• None of the files generated during build are checked in git (usually in .gitignore they are filtered by default); sometimes there is a separate "deployment" repository, or similar, completely separate from the source one

A more complex way would be to have your release work process encoded in a Makefile which is outside the scope of this question, however a good source of inspiration can be found here and here. You will find good correspondeces between Makefile targets and setup.py commands.