Dev Releases¶

About¶

To make use of a .dev suffix, as per PEP440.

If multiple active branches attempt to create a tag relative to the main branch, there is a possibility that they will attempt to create the same tag, resulting in a collision.

Developmental releases aim to avoid this by including a .dev segment which includes a non-negative integer unique to that workflow:

X.Y.devN

How to¶

Example 1: CircleCI¶

For example, CircleCI provides CIRCLE_BUILD_NUM, a unique number for each job which will increment with each run:

--devrelease ${CIRCLE_BUILD_NUM}

This will result in a unique developmental release of, for example:

1.3.2.dev2478

Example 2: GitHub¶

GitHub also provides GITHUB_RUN_ID, a "unique number for each workflow run" which will also provide a unique number for each workflow:

--devrelease ${GITHUB_RUN_ID}

This will result in a unique developmental release of, for example:

1.3.2.dev6048584598

Example 3: Unix time¶

Equally, as the developmental release needs only a non-negative integer, it is possible to use the Unix time (i.e. the number of seconds since 1st January 1970 UTC).

This approach could potentially create a collision if two builds occur at precisely the same second, but it may be sufficient for many use cases:

--devrelease $(date +%s)

This will result in a unique developmental release of, for example:

1.3.2.dev1696238452