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GitHub Action

Generalized Automatic Tags

1.0.1 Latest version

Generalized Automatic Tags

tag

Generalized Automatic Tags

Automatically generate new tags by extracting their names from a given source file

Installation

Copy and paste the following snippet into your .yml file.

              

- name: Generalized Automatic Tags

uses: Jaliborc/[email protected]

Learn more about this action in Jaliborc/action-general-autotag

Choose a version

General AutoTag 📑

This action will read a chosen source file and extract the current version from it. It will then compare it to the project's known tags and, if a corresponding tag does not exist, it will be created.

Forked from Autotag, which worked specifically with Node projects. This approach is more flexible and works with different programming languages.

Usage

The following is an example .github/main.workflow that will execute when a push to the master branch occurs. It will extract the current version number from package.json:

name: My Workflow

on:
  push:
    paths:
    - package.json
    branches:
    - master

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@master
    - uses: jaliborc/[email protected]
      with:
        GITHUB_TOKEN: "${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}"
        source_file: "package.json"
        extraction_regex: "\\s*\"version\"s*:\\s*\"([\\d\\.]+)\""

To make this work, the workflow must have the checkout action before the tagging action.

This order is important!

- uses: actions/checkout@master
- uses: jaliborc/[email protected]

If the repository is not checked out first, the action cannot find the chosen source file.

Configuration

Mandatory

The GITHUB_TOKEN, a source_file and an extraction_regex must be passed in. Without this, it is not possible to create a new tag. Make sure the autotag action looks like the following example:

- uses: jaliborc/[email protected]
  with:
    GITHUB_TOKEN: "${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}"
    source_file: # the file in your repository that contains the version name
    extraction_regex: # some regex pattern

The action will automatically extract the github token at runtime. DO NOT MANUALLY ENTER YOUR TOKEN. If you put the actual token in your workflow file, you're make it accessible in plaintext to anyone who ever views the repository (it will be in your git history).

Optional

There are a few options to customize how the tag is created.

  1. tag_format

    By default, the action will tag versions exactly as matched in the source file. Prefixes and suffixes can be used to add text around the tag name. For example, if the current version is 1.0.0 and the tag_format is set to v{version} (beta), then the tag would be labeled as v1.0.0 (beta).

    - uses: jaliborc/[email protected]
      with:
        GITHUB_TOKEN: "${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}"
        source_file: "package.json"
        extraction_regex: "(\\d+\\.\\d+\\.\\d+)"
        tag_format: "v{version} (beta)"
  2. tag_message

    This is the annotated commit message associated with the tag. By default, a changelog will be generated from the commits between the latest tag and the new tag (HEAD). This will override that with a hard-coded message.

    - uses: jaliborc/[email protected]
      with:
        GITHUB_TOKEN: "${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}"
        source_file: "project.toc"
        extraction_regex: "Version:\\s*(\\d+)"
        tag_message: "Custom message goes here."

Output

If you are building an action that runs after this one, be aware this action produces several outputs:

  1. tagname will be empty if no tag was created, or it will be the value of the new tag.
  2. tagsha: The SHA of the new tag.
  3. taguri: The URI/URL of the new tag reference.
  4. tagmessage: The message applied to the tag reference (this is what shows up on the tag screen on GitHub).
  5. version will be the version attribute found in the chosen source file.