I’ve posted today a git repository called Toolchain. This is a collection of scripts that I use that others may find helpful. You can find the repository here. In this post, I’m going to talk about one of the items in Toolchain called Gitcrement.
Gitcrement is a set of two scripts that solves the problem of creating build numbers when using git for source control. Unlike Subversion, where the repository revision is the perfect choice for a build number, git has no such luxury because it uses SHA1 hashes for identifiers.
This is where Gitcrement comes in. Gitcrement is a simple interface to a database that contains a sequential ID number (the build number), a username, the current date/time, and a git SHA1 hash.
The gitcrement.py has four commands: init, next, list, and current.
To create a new Gitcrement database, go into any git repository root and type “gitcrement init“, which will create a new database file called .gitcrement.
When you want to create a new build number, simply type “gitcrement next” to record the current user (`whoami`), date and time, and whatever SHA1 hash `git info .` would reveal.
To see the current build number type “gitcrement current” and to get a list of all the build numbers type “gitcrement list“.
That’s all there is to it. To make this system useful, however, it needs a script that can be run in Xcode to automatically call “next” and save the value as CFBundleVersion in Info.plist. So, there’s another Python script called xcbuild.py, which you can use as a Custom Shell Script Build Phase. This will advance the Gitcrement number every time you build the “Release” target in Xcode.
Gitcrement requires Python 3.0, which is not installed by default in Leopard. You can find it here or through MacPorts or fink.
Also, you may need to edit the installation paths in the tops of both files to point to where your copy of “git” is (in gitcrement.py) and where you install the “gitcrement” script (in xcbuild.py).
You can download Gitcrement here:
Link in Gitweb
Source TGZ