⬆️ In this post in my series on CI/CD for UiPath RPA projects, I will share insights into automating version management using PowerShell. Today, we look at a sample implementation based on Git commit messages.

In previous posts, I explored:

• 🎯 The central role of projectVersion as stored in the project.json file
• 📘 What Semantic Version is and how it is implemented in UiPath Studio

The entire script is available as a gist: View Gist It contains 2 PowerShell functions to:

• 🔍 Parse-SemVer
• ⬆️ Increment-SemVer which I also publish elsewhere as a PowerShell module. But for the sake of simplicity, the functions are included in the script file.

📜 At the core, the script contains:

$projectJson = Get-Content ".\project.json" -Raw | ConvertFrom-Json
$commitMessage = (git log --format=%B -n 1) -join " "
$incrementedVersion = Increment-SemVer -semVerString $projectJson.projectVersion -commitMessage $commitMessage

$projectJson.projectVersion = $incrementedVersion
$projectJson | ConvertTo-Json -Depth 99 | Set-Content ".\project.json"

git add ".\project.json" && git commit -m "Version bump in project.json" && git push

Here is what Increment-SemVer does to a projectVersion of 0.2.3:

–commitMessage ‘BREAKING CHANGE: Refactoring output arguments for use via Orchestrator API, incompatible with previous versions.’ 👉 Major increment to 1.0.0

-commitMessage ‘Feature: Add dynamic email templating capability to customer notification process.’ 👉 Minor increment to 0.3.0

-commitMessage ‘Bug Fix: Resolve memory leak in PDF generation module observed under high load conditions.’ 👉 Patch increment to 0.2.4

🔑 Key point is: The words in the commit message determine the version increment.

It might come as a surprise to RPA developers that this approach bypasses the UiPath Studio “publish” function and has requirements on well-crafted commit messages. But as RPA (and UiPath Studio) matures, our skillset also has to converge towards best practices in other coding environments.