gradle release and version management plugin

Releasing versions in Gradle is very different from releasing in Maven. Maven came with maven-release-plugin which did all the dirty work. Gradle has no such tool and probably doesn't need it anyway. Evolution of software craft came to the point, when we start thinking about SCM as ultimate source of truth about project version. Version should not be hardcoded in pom.xml or build.gradle.

axion-release-plugin embraces this philosophy. Instead of reading project version from buildfile, it is derived from nearest tag in SCM (or set to default if nothing was tagged). If current commit is tagged commit, project has a release version. If there were any commits after last tag, project is in SNAPSHOT version. This very simple and intuitive philosophy, alongside with Semantic Versioning rules, makes it a lot easier to manage project versions along SCM tag versions.

plugins {
    id 'pl.allegro.tech.build.axion-release' version '1.4.0'
}

scmVersion {
    tag {
        prefix = 'my-project-name'
    }
}

project.version = scmVersion.version

Documentation is available at axion-release read the docs.

There are a few plugins that try to do the same - question is do we need another one?

• build-version-plugin - plugin that was main source of inspiration, reads build version but lacks release options
• ari gradle-release-plugin - takes only branch/tag name for version
• townsfolk gradle-release-plugin - more oldschhol, maven-release-plugin-like approach

What I needed was plugin that exposes version taken from nearest tag (like build-version-plugin) which at the same time will be easily integrated with maven-publish and signing. It also needs to be Continuous Integration-aware.

axion-release-plugin is published under Apache License 2.0.