Burning the last GIT commit into your telemetry/log

Posted on: 2018-08-30

I enjoy knowing exactly what happens in the systems that I am actively working and that I need to maintain. One way to ease the process is to know precisely the version of the system when an error occurs. There are many ways to proceed like having a sequential number increasing, or having a version number (major, minor, path). I found that the easiest way is to leverage the GIT hash. The reason is that not only it point me into a unique place in the life of the code, but it also removes all manual incrementation that a version number has or to have to use/build something to increment a number for me.

The problem with the GIT hash is that you cannot run it locally. The reason is that every change you are doing must be committed and pushed. Hence the hash will always be at least one hash before the last. The idea is to inject the hash at build time in the continuous integration (CI) pipeline. This way, the CI is always running on the latest code (or a specific branch) and knows what is the code being compiled thus without having to save anything could inject the hash.

At the moment, I am working with Jenkins and React using the react-script-ts. I only had to change the build command to inject into a React environment variable a Git command.

"build": "REACT_APP_VERSION=$(git rev-parse --short HEAD) react-scripts-ts build",

In the code, I can get the version by using the process environment.

const applicationVersion = process.env.REACT_APP_VERSION;

The code is minimal and leverage Git system and environment variable that can be read inside React application easily. There is no mechanism to maintain, and the hash is a source of truth. When a bug occurs, it is easy to setup the development environment to the exact commit and to use the remaining of the logs to find out how the user reached the exception.