Github Actions: Get the next build number

A few days ago in our company we decided to rebuild our CI from scratch. Our new CI is based on the following principles:

• We want to have a CI that is easy to use and maintain.
• We want to have a CI that is easy to extend and reuse
• We want to have a CI that is easy to understand and to read

Since we're using Github Actions to perform our CI we decided to open a new repo inspired to Raycast's Github Actions Repo, and so we created this repo.

This makes our CI more readable and easier to maintain. If there's a bug or something wrong you don't have to edit every project YAML to fix it, but is centralized in a single place.

Ok you might wondering: "the title of this article is about getting the next build number" not about Github Actions.

Our build process works as the following:

• main branch is the production
• develop branch is the next release

Then we have

• feature/* for upcoming features

We wanted to have a build number related to features, since the docker tag released is:

• feature/add-my-feature -> add-my-feature.<build-number>

So we created a Github Action that gets the next build number for a specific branch. It's a simple bash script that gets the latest tag matching the branch name and increments the build number, if the tag is not available uses 1 as starting number.

#!/bin/bash
 
# @see https://docs.github.com/en/actions/using-workflows/workflow-commands-for-github-actions
# @see https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/25939
 
set -e
 
BRANCH_NAME=${GITHUB_REF##*/}
BRANCH_NAME=${BRANCH_NAME//\//-}
 
if [ -z "$BRANCH_NAME" ]; then
	echo "::error::Could not retrive BRANCH_NAME"
	exit 1
fi
 
# We use NOTICE to show the variable in the Github Action log
echo "::notice::BRANCH_NAME=${BRANCH_NAME}"
 
# Get the Tags sorted
BUILD_NUMBER=$(git tag | sort --version-sort)
 
# Grep for the branch name
BUILD_NUMBER=$(echo "${BUILD_NUMBER}" | grep "$BRANCH_NAME" || true)
 
# Get the last tag and extract the build number
BUILD_NUMBER=$(echo "${BUILD_NUMBER}" | tail -n 1 | awk -F. '{print $2}')
 
# Trim
BUILD_NUMBER=$(echo "${BUILD_NUMBER}" | xargs echo -n)
 
# Check if the build number is empty
# if it's empty we use 1 as starting number
# otherwise we increment the build number
if [ -z "$BUILD_NUMBER" ]; then
	BUILD_NUMBER=1
else
	BUILD_NUMBER=$((BUILD_NUMBER + 1))
fi
 
TAG="$BRANCH_NAME.$BUILD_NUMBER"
echo "::notice::TAG=${TAG}"
 
# Output the next new tag
echo "tag=$TAG" >>$GITHUB_OUTPUT