Gitlab-ci and Maven: how to deal with project version?

Question

How exactly should gitlab-ci behave to version my project ?

A simple git flow on gitlab could be:

• commit on master -> build, test and deploy to staging
• tag on master -> build, test and deploy to production

But how do you deal with version ?

1- should the deploy version be based on the tag ? if yes do you update the pom.xml with the tag name? (seems dangerous if you make a mistake)

2- should the version be taken care of by maven release ? if yes, how do you trigger deploy to production ? (because the tag is now managed by maven)

What would be best practice here ? (you can propose other flow)

Answer 1

I personally dislike it if the release/deployment process makes any commits or tags on its own. Therefore, in general my preferred approach is:

1. Versions are managed manually, but possibly using utility scripts. E.g. if a developer runs ./bump-version v1.2.3 that could take care of updating the version number in the correct places and creating a tag, and could ensure that the version number was increased correctly.

2. The CI can include checks that all version information is consistent: If the build was triggered by a tag, does the pom.xml version match the version in the tag? A couple of regexes is all that's typically needed. You wouldn't write these checks as part of your unit tests, but as a separate test script.