# GitLab Flavored Semantic Versionin

### Goal

This project tries to achieve automatic semantic versioning not basing the version bump
on the conventional commits standars, but rather on a `Changelog` value on the trailer
of commit messages.

This works well if a project follows a similar workflow to the one used at GitLab, where
each change must not be made on a development branch, never on the release branch and needs
to get merged through a merge request.

The beauty of this project is that you don't need to use the conventional commits specification,
so you can have commits more similar to

```
Added new feature A to address this requirement
```

instead of

```
feat(<type>): added new feature A to address this requirement
```

This translates to:
- _**no "wasted" characters for that message prefix**_
- more readable commit messages
- a nicer `Changelog`
    ```
    New features:
    - Added new feature A to address this requirement
    - Added feature B
    ```
  vs
    ```
    New features:
    - feat(<type>): added new feature A to address this requirement
    - feat: added feature B
    ```

### Setup

The only tool you need to setup this project on your local environment is Ruby, which can be
downloaded using `asdf`. The Ruby version required is `2.7.5`.

Once Ruby is present on your system you can install the dependencies by running

```shell
bundle install
```

### Testing

At the moment there's no built-in testing platform, but I'm planning to use `rspec` to add unit tests.

### Using

This project is available as a Ruby gem, so to be able to use it is enough to run

```shell
gem install gfsm
```

Once that command completes, the gem will be available and you can invoke it from the command line with

```shell
gfsm help
```

The main way this project can be used though, is inside a CI pipeline where you can invoke it to bump the version and/or update the changelog.

In order to use is inside a CI job, the job itself could look something like this:

```yaml
stages:
  - version

update-version:
  stage: version
  image: ruby:2.7.5
  before_script:
    - gem install gfsm
  script:
    - gfsm version bump --force > .version
    - gfsm changelog --force --output-file CHANGELOG.md
    - echo "RELEASE_VERSION=$(<.version)" >> variables.env
  artifacts:
    reports:
      dotenv: variables.env
    paths:
      - .version
      - CHANGELOG.md
```

With this, subsequent jobs that depend on the `update-version` job will:
- be able to get the new version form the `RELEASE_VERSION` environment variable
- read the `CHANGELOG.md` file to get an updated changelog file

To have a working example of the things described above you can have a look at the `.gitlab-ci.yml` of this project, which implements this exact concept.