What is the proper strategy for running this inside GitLab CI/CD?

[doulighan]

Having trouble coming up with a good solution here.

When you push a tag to gitlab, it starts a tag pipeline. The tag pipeline a) has no associated branch, and b) uses a detached head.

This means the git for-each-ref --merged master call made by poetry-dynamic-versioning fails. The detatched head doesn't know about master, and gets a malformed object name master error. I can manually checkout master and the versioning will work, but the tag pipeline might itself not actually be associated with the master branch. I could have tagged development instead, which would also trigger a tag pipeline. Because the tag pipeline doesn't have any concept of a branch, I don't really know what to checkout before I run my poetry build.

Additionally, if I manually run git for-each-ref "refs/tags/**" --format "%(refname)" --sort -creatordate --merged HEAD, then I get the proper tag output. Is there a way to tell the library to use --merged HEAD instead of --merged master?

Another option would be to stop using tag pipelines all-together. Instead, I run a pipeline on a merge or push to master. In this case I can be confident about the current branch, and let dynamic-versioning calculate the tag based on previous tag history. But this has the issue of not letting me simply tag a commit to create a release. I have to make sure the tag I want has already been created in history before the actual code changes are merged, it seems backwards and probably will lead to having to run multiple pipelines to get a proper release. Merge once to get the changes, manually tag the merge commit, then re-run the merge pipeline to actually trigger the versioning on that new tag. Definitely feels wonky.

I have a feeling I'm just thinking about this wrong. Does anyone have experience with this?

[mtkennerly]

Hi! Thanks for the detailed question.

When you push a tag to gitlab, it starts a tag pipeline. The tag pipeline a) has no associated branch, and b) uses a detached head.

I'm not as familiar with GitLab as I am with GitHub, but I think you could fix it with some combination of these GitLab settings:

• GIT_DEPTH: 0 in the variables section
• git checkout "$CI_COMMIT_REF_NAME" in the before_script section

Is there a way to tell the library to use --merged HEAD instead of --merged master?

It uses HEAD by default, and you can customize it with the tag-branch option. Where are you seeing it default to master?

[doulighan]

Ah thank you! Absolutely my mistake, I was specifying "master" to be the default tag_branch without knowing it. Appreciate the help!