Getting current Git commit version from within Rails app?

Question

How can I retrieve the current Git commit version from within a Ruby on Rails app?

Want to display the Git version (or maybe the last 6 letters or so) to serve as an App version.

Answer 1

Like @meagar said, use backticks to execute the shell command from within your app, but you may find these two commands more useful:

Full hash:

git rev-parse HEAD

First 7 characters of hash:

git rev-parse --short HEAD

Answer 2

You can invoke the git command from within your script:

commit = `git show --pretty=%H`
puts commit

Depending on your environment you may want to use the full path to the git binary, and possibly specify the GIT_DIR via an environment variable or --git-dir.