Get latest git tags on Gitlab CI/CD pipeline

Question

I want to set up a CI/CD pipelines in Gitlab that can read the latest tag and get that last tag to increment my next version application. I came with this configuration:

stages:
  - version

calculate_version:
  image:
    name: alpine/git:latest
    entrypoint: [""]
  stage: version
  script:
    - VERSION=$(git tag);test -z "$VERSION" && echo "no version tag found" && exit 1
    - CMDLINE="$VERSION";
    - echo $VERSION
    - echo $CMDLINE > cmdline
  artifacts:
    paths:
      - cmdline

But i get no tags listed there on $VERSION. Its look like Gitlab not passing the tags on the repository. However if I create and push a new tag, it shows just that new tag, not all tag list I expected.

Is this the behaviour of the GitLab ci/cd? If yes, how can I get all of the tags in my repo inside the pipeline?

Answer 1

You can obtain tags using Gitlab API

By default, results are ordered by the last updated tags, so if you want to get the last one, you can modify your script block like this:

script:
  - VERSION=$(curl -Ss --request GET --header "PRIVATE-TOKEN: <REPLACE_BY_A_VARIABLE>" "https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/${CI_PROJECT_ID}/repository/tags" | jq -r '.[0] | .name')
  - test -z "$VERSION" && echo "no version tag found" && exit 1

Answer 2

You can do this very easily without long script code.

script:
  - git fetch --tags
  - git tag --list | sort -V | tail -n1

assign in variable ${VER} with your version:

script:
  - VER=$(git tag --list | sort -V | tail -n1)

Answer 3

Without GitLab API, you can just use:

script: 
  git describe --abbrev=0 2>/dev/null || echo ''

assign in variable to compare with your version:

script: 
  last_v=$(git describe --abbrev=0 2>/dev/null || echo '')
  

Return last tag or empty string if no tag found (using 2>/dev/null to hide error code)

⚠️ Warning:

After test, leaving Tag message blank creates a lightweight tag, and command above will not work.