Where do you store your Rails Application's version number?

Question

We use the wonderful semantic versioning paradigm when versioning our rails app. One question I had was where is it best to store this number? I\'ve seen it stored in /l

Answer 1

We can use the git gem and create an initializer to set our application version using git describe

Add the git gem to the development group.

# Gemfile
# ...
group :development do
  gem 'git'
  # ...
end

Don't forget to run bundle.

Create a new initializer file.

# config/initializers/version.rb

if Rails.env.development?
  g = Git.open(Rails.root)
  version = g.describe
  puts "Setting application version to #{version}"
  File.write('config/VERSION', version)
end

module MyApp
  VERSION = File.read('config/VERSION').strip
end

Now we can access the version like so:

➤  rails c
Setting application version to v2.1.3-7-gd5d8ea1
Loading development environment (Rails 5.2.3)
jruby-9.2.6.0 :001 > MyApp::VERSION
 => "v2.1.3-7-gd5d8ea1"