In a previous post, I showed how to use GitVersion with Jenkins but unfortunately as I got further into my Jenkins usage, I was not able to get GitVersion to consistently work across pull request, tags and main branch. Several times I thought I had it working only to find out as I fixed it for one of the places I needed to use it that I broke it for the other places. It felt like I was spending more time trying to get GitVersion working then I did on getting the whole build working. So it was time for a different solution.
GitVersion is what we were using to determine the version number to use for our nuget packages and releases. It made it so that we did not have to remember each sprint to increment our version number which we routinely forgot to do until we started packaging a release and then it just delayed us as the build needed to run with the new version number.
The replacement tool we decide on was jx-release-version. jx-release-version just worked out of the box the first time in all of my scenarios (pull request, tags, and main branch).
Below we will go through the code I needed to add to my Jenkinsfile to get jx-release-version to give me the version number to use.
In my ASP.NET Core project, I am using an environment variable in the form of MyProject:MyVariableName and needed to create a Jenkins pipeline but I could not get it to recognize that format. It kept making the environment variable name just MyVariableName. Below is the code from the Jenkinsfile that I tried that was causing the issue. stage('Run All Test') { environment { MyProject:MyVariableName = "Some Value" } } Turns out that Jenkins does not recognize the : in environment variable names.
For my continuous integration builds I use Gitversion to determine that SemVer to use for a particular build and release. For pre-release builds the version would look like something like 0.1.5-ci0004 where the -ci is appended to the version number and the 4 is the build number in the CI system. Then for a release release version, it would just be the version number of 0.1.5 without the -ci or build number at the end.
I am in the process of moving several builds to Jenkins and needed to get Gitversion working on Jenkins. I am totally new to Jenkins so even though Gitversion has documentation on how to set up Jenkins correctly it took me a bit to figure out where those options were. My initial attempts ended up with the pre-release being 0.1.5-origin-master-0004 instead of 0.1.5-ci0004.