One-stop shop for working with semantic versions in your GitHub Actions workflows

Posted on 2 mins to read

GitHub Actions are so cool!

Check out our recording about them @ Ministry of Testing Abu Dhabi if you want a quick sneak peek, but today I want to self-advertise one of the reusable Actions I made for you. And it wasn’t hard at all, thanks to the way they work (although I’m going to rant about that in future articles).

You have heard about Semantic Versioning, haven’t you? If you are a developer you probably know a lot of libraries using Semantic Versioning. Chances are, you even use it for your projects.

Sometimes during CI/CD in such projects, you need to take simple actions with versions: compare and parse them. E.g. you may want to check that a PR to the main branch increases the version ($new_version > $old_version) or you may want to create or update a v$major.$minor / v$major tag whenever you release your project.

This is what madhead/semver-utils is for! Just drop it into your workflow and use it for various operations with versions:

- uses: madhead/semver-utils@latest
  id: version
  with:
    version: 1.2.3
    compare-to: 2.1.0
- run: |
    echo "${{ steps.version.outputs.major }}"             # 1
    echo "${{ steps.version.outputs.minor }}"             # 2
    echo "${{ steps.version.outputs.patch }}"             # 3
    echo "${{ steps.version.outputs.comparison-result }}" # <

Yeah, it supports only a few operations currently, but those are the ones I needed badly in other projects. Actions are super easy to create using TypeScript (or Docker, for more sophisticated ones), so I’ve made an action for myself (and others) in just one night. I’ve planned some extra features for upcoming releases, so check it out or maybe open an issue with a feature you’re missing? I just want to know if it is useful or not.

I want this action to become a one-stop shop for working with semantic versions in your GitHub Actions workflows one day!