How can I get the Git build number and embed it in a file?

Question

I want to introduce a versioning constant grabbed from the version in Git. I know how to do this -- in a very hackish way in svn --

any ideas on how to do this with Git?

Answer 1

For me, git describe didn't initially give the hashtag. The following did, however:

git describe --all --long

This results in something of the by kubi described format. Supposing you would only want the last part (hashtag) something like the following would do (saving to version.txt file):

git describe --all --long | tr "-" " " | awk '{ print $3 }' > version.txt

EDIT: As a friend pointed out to me this can actually be done using just cut instead, if you so desire:

git describe --all --long | cut -d "-" -f 3 > version.txt

Answer 2

Here's what I do:

As part of my build process I run the following script (paraphrased, since I'm not at Xcode right now)

git describe --all > version.txt

Inside my application I read the version number out of this file and display it to the user (when necessary). Make sure you add version.txt to your .gitignore. The benefit of doing it this way is that if you tag your releases git describe will just output the tag, otherwise it'll output the commit hash.