Semantic versioning with AWS CodeBuild

Question

Currently my team is using Jenkins to manage our CI/CD workflow. As our infrastructure is entirely in AWS I have been looking into migrating to AWS CodePipeline/CodeBuild to manage this.

In current state, we are versioning our artifacts as such <major>.<minor>.<patch>-<jenkins build #> i.e. 1.1.1-987. However, CodeBuild doesn't seem to have any concept of a build number. As artifacts are stored in s3 like <bucket>/<version>/<artifact> I would really hate to lose this versioning approach.

CodeBuild does provide a few env variables that i can see here: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/codebuild/latest/userguide/build-env-ref.html#build-env-ref-env-vars

But from what is available it seems silly to try to use the build ID or anything else.

Is there anything readily available from CodeBuild that could support an incremental build #? Or is there an AWS recommended approach to semantic versioning? Searching this topic returns remarkably low results

Any help or suggestions is greatly appreciated

Answer 1

The suggestion to use date wasn't really going to work for our use case. We ended up creating a base version in SSM and creating a script that runs within the buildspec that grabs, increments, and updates the version back to SSM. It's easy enough to do:

• Create a String/SecureString within SSM as [NAME]. For example lets say "BUILD_VERSION". The value should be in [MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH] or [MAJOR.PATCH].
• Create a shell script. The one below should be taken as a basic template, you will have to modify it to your needs:

#!/bin/bash
if [ "$1" = 'next' ]; then
    version=$(aws ssm get-parameter --name "BUILD_VERSION" --region 'us-east-1' --with-decryption | sed -n -e 's/.*Value\"[^\"]*//p' | sed -n -e 's/[\"\,]//gp')
    majorminor=$(printf $version | grep -o ^[0-9]*\\.[0-9]*\. | tr -d '\n')
    patch=$(printf $version | grep -o [0-9]*$ | tr -d '\n')
    patch=$(($patch+1))
    silent=$(aws ssm put-parameter --name "BUILD_VERSION" --value "$majorminor$patch" --type "SecureString" --overwrite)
    echo "$majorminor$patch"
fi

• Call the versioning script from within buildspec and use the output however you need.