How to check out most recent git tag using Ansible?

Question

Is there an easy way to have Ansible check out the most recent tag on a particular git branch, without having to specify or pass in the tag? That is, can Ansible detect or derive the most recent tag on a branch or is that something that needs to be done separately using the shell module or something?

Answer 1

Ansible doesn't have checking out of the latest tag as a built in feature. It does have the update parameter for its git module which will ensure a particular repo is fully up to date with the HEAD of its remote.

---
- git:
[email protected]:username/reponame.git
dest={{ path }}
update=yes
force=no

Force will checkout the latest version of the repository overwriting uncommitted changes or fail if set to false and uncommitted changes exist.

See http://docs.ansible.com/git_module.html for more options on this module.

You could do two things at this point:

1) Have a separate branch with your tags on it, and just stay up to that using the update parameter.

2) You could also use the shell module and implement something similar to: Git Checkout Latest Tag

---
- name: get new tags from remote
  shell: "git fetch --tags"
  args:
    chdir: "{{ path }}"

- name: get latest tag name
  shell: "git describe --tags `git rev-list --tags --max-count=1`"
  args:
    chdir: "{{ path }}"
  register: latest_tag

And then use that result as a refspec with the git module

- git:
[email protected]:username/reponame.git
dest={{ path }}
version: latest_tag.stdout