Version management#

This guide covers the methods of updating your version string everywhere.

This guide covers:#

Your goal is to make sure that you bump your version string everywhere it may appear, in unison, prior to publishing your package. A version number can be in init.py, setup.cfg, etc.

In increasing order of work, but decreasing order of magic, the methods of bumping your version string are listed below.

Using git tags:#

You can use setuptools_scm to automatically generate version numbers for your package based on tagged commits.

# configure in pyproject.toml, then…
$ git tag -a v0.1.0 -m v0.1.0

The next time you run python -m build, either locally or in GitHub actions, your package version will be based on the latest git tag.

Using a local script to edit files:#

One tool for doing this is bump2version. For example:

   $ pip install bump2version
   # configure all the places you use your version, then, to update:
   $ bump2version --current-version 0.5.1 minor

Manually#

Updating the version number manually involves going through everywhere your version is declared and changing the version number before building your distribution. This is not recommended, you will eventually make mistakes and have mismatched version/metadata somewhere. In some cases this will lead to your build process failing, but it can fail silently too.

Tips:#

  • The “best” versioning and deployment workflow is the one you will actually use!

  • Get comfortable with at least one workflow for versioning and deploying your package otherwise, you won’t do it.

The next topic in this series is Developer tools.

Other topics in this series:#