Miniver

Like versioneer, but smaller

Miniver is a minimal versioning tool that serves the same purpose as Versioneer, except that it is not designed to be cross platform, and only works with Git.

Why would I use this?

If you are developing a Python package inside a Git repository and want to get the version directly from Git tags, rather than hard-coding version strings everywhere.

This is the same problem that Versioneer solves, but Miniver is less than 200 lines of code, whereas Versioneer is over 2000. The tradeoff is that Miniver only works with Git and Python 3.5 (or above), and has only been tested on Debian Linux and Mac OSX (so far).

Support for Python 2 is not a goal, as Python 2 is fast approaching its end of life (2020), and we want to encourage people to use Python 3! That being said, Christian Marquardt has a fork that also works with Python 2

Usage

The simplest way to use Miniver is to run the following in your project root:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jbweston/miniver/master/install-miniver | python - <your_package_directory>

This will grab the latest files from GitHub and set up Miniver for your project.

I get an unknown version!

The version is reported as unknown (plus the current git hash) when there are no valid tags in the git history. You should create an annotated tag so that Miniver reports a reasonable version.

If your project uses unannotated tags for versioning (though this is not the recommended way) then you'll need to run the following in order to modify Miniver's behaviour:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jbweston/miniver/master/unannotated-tags.patch | patch <your_package_directory>/_version.py

I don't want to type that URL every time I use this

You can pip install miniver, which will give you the install-miniver script. Then you can simply run the following from your project root to use Miniver:

install-miniver <your_package_directory>

Can I use this without executing random code from the internet?

Sure! Copy miniver/_version.py and miniver/_static_version.py from this repository into your package directory, then copy the following snippets into the appropriate files:

# Your package's __init__.py
from ._version import __version__
del _version

# Your project's setup.py

# Loads _version.py module without importing the whole package.
def get_version_and_cmdclass(package_name):
    import os
    from importlib.util import module_from_spec, spec_from_file_location
    spec = spec_from_file_location('version',
                                   os.path.join(package_name, '_version.py'))
    module = module_from_spec(spec)
    spec.loader.exec_module(module)
    return module.__version__, module.cmdclass


version, cmdclass = get_version_and_cmdclass('my_package')

setup(
    name='my_package',
    version=version,
    cmdclass=cmdclass,
)

# Your project's .gitattributes
my_package/_static_version.py export-subst

replacing 'my_package' in the above with the name of your package (this should be the same as the name of the directory into which you copied the contents of miniver).

That's it!

License

Miniver is in the public domain under a CC0 license.