---
draft: false
title: The Joy of Versioning
aliases:
  - The Joy of Versioning
series:
  - building-with-bazel
series_order: 2
date: "2023-09-02"
author: Nick Dumas
cover: ""
keywords: []
summary: "Investing in tooling makes adhering to good practices almost easy enough to be joyful."
showFullContent: false
tags:
  - bazel
  - golang
---

## What am I Doing?
Too many times this year I've found myself struggling to improve my [blog pipeline](/series/blogging-with-quartz/) because I couldn't keep track of when code stopped and started doing what it was supposed to do. This was entirely my own fault, I was not observing best-practices:
- I wasn't using semantic versioning
- I wasn't tagging
- all development happened on main
- etc etc

All of this worked well enough for private use monoliths, one-offs and skunkworks projects but these Drone pipelines presented a new challenge.

Drone pipelines tend to be structured as a series of docker images operating on a mount that gets injected into all of them so they can share their work. This is fine, docker images are an easy fire-and-forget solution for deploying tools.

As things grew more complex, my sloppy coding practices put me in a lot of unnecessary tight spots.
- Some parts of the pipeline were idempotent, others weren't.
- Some parts of the pipeline were affected by each other's work. For example, one step scans files for attachments and copies them into Hugo-appropriate directories, and the next transforms links from Obsidian to Hugo layouts.
- I frequently wanted to implement multiple features/fixes simultaneously but when this took longer than planned, rolling back to a known-good version was impossible because my docker images are only tagged with `latest`.

All of this added up to things breaking for far longer than they needed to, more often than they needed to. Eventually, enough was enough. I drew a line in the sand and decided that I wasn't going to live like this anymore.

After some digging I found resources that helped me build a Makefile to take care of things. That first Makefile added a **lot** but I'm only going to cover the tooling for semantic versioning and git tagging; the rest of that Makefile was go cross-compilation and docker image stuff that I'm replacing with bazel.

To handle automatically incrementing semver values, I landed on  `bump`. Because it's written in Go, I was able to fork it and patch a few minor issues and make sure that it keeps working for the foreseeable future.

## Why does it work?
My current solution relies on a few pieces: `bump` and my Makefile invoking some git commands.
```Makefile {title="Makefile"}
VERSION ?= $(shell git -C "$(MD)" describe --tags --dirty=-dev)
COMMIT_ID := $(shell git -C "$(MD)" rev-parse HEAD | head -c8)

setup-bump:
  go install github.com/therealfakemoot/bump@latest

bump-major: setup-bump
  bump major

bump-minor: setup-bump
  bump minor

bump-patch: setup-bump
  bump patch
```

[bump](https://github.com/guilhem/bump) is a golang utility that'll read a git repository's tags and apply a [semantic versioning](https://semver.org/) compliant version increment. `bump patch` bumps `v0.0.1` to `v0.0.2`. `bump major` goes from `v2.24.5` to `v3.0.0`. You get the idea.

All together, this suite works perfectly for handling tagging. I don't have a super rigorous policy on what constitutes a major, minor, or patch version but being able to `make bump-patch` to tag a specific known-good commit made a world of difference. My drone pipelines became drastically more reliable thanks to version pinning.

# But what about Bazel?
Bazel isn't directly involved in manipulating tags yet. To do that, I'll need to add bazel build files to the `bump` repo. I'll cover that in the next post, where I cover how to use bazel's stamping funtionality.
