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66 lines
3.8 KiB
Markdown
66 lines
3.8 KiB
Markdown
---
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draft: false
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title: The Joy of Versioning
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aliases:
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- The Joy of Versioning
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series:
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- building-with-bazel
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series_order: 2
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date: "2023-09-02"
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author: Nick Dumas
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cover: ""
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keywords: []
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description: "Investing in tooling makes adhering to good practices almost easy enough to be joyful."
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showFullContent: false
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tags:
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- bazel
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- golang
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---
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## What am I Doing?
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Too many times this year I've found myself struggling to improve my [blog pipeline](https://blog.ndumas.com/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:
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- I wasn't using semantic versioning
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- I wasn't tagging
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- all development happened on main
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- etc etc
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All of this worked well enough for private use monoliths, one-offs and skunkworks projects but these Drone pipelines presented a new challenge.
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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.
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As things grew more complex, my sloppy coding practices put me in a lot of unnecessary tight spots.
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- Some parts of the pipeline were idempotent, others weren't.
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- 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.
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- 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`.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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## Why does it work?
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My current solution relies on a few pieces: `bump` and my Makefile invoking some git commands.
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```Makefile {title="Makefile"}
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VERSION ?= $(shell git -C "$(MD)" describe --tags --dirty=-dev)
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COMMIT_ID := $(shell git -C "$(MD)" rev-parse HEAD | head -c8)
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setup-bump:
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go install github.com/therealfakemoot/bump@latest
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bump-major: setup-bump
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bump major
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bump-minor: setup-bump
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bump minor
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bump-patch: setup-bump
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bump patch
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```
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[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.
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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.
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# But what about Bazel?
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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. |