A GitHub Action allowing users to query tags via git describe --tags.

This is useful, for example, if you want to generate a changelog from your last release tag to your newest. Rather than apply that logic to multiple changelog tools, this action will set an output parameter to the last found tag. You should then be able to use that parameter in any changelog utility you'd like.

This action acts as a wrapper around git describe --tags, performing an unshallow operation on the git repository by default.

The actions/checkout@v2 action will check out a shallow repository. Although that action's readme documents how to unshallow, many users will never read that readme. For those savvy users who are already performing an unshallow, you may skip that operation in this action by passing the input skip-unshallow: "true".

Optional Glob pattern of tags to include

The include option is passed to the git describe --match option. It is renamed in this action to complement exclude because I felt that include/exclude made more sense than match/exclude (Sorry, Linus).

Optional Glob pattern of tags to exclude

The exclude pattern may be of use for those projects which have beta or rc type tags. This allows one to define "Release" patterns via include and skip over non-release patterns via exclude. For the changelog use case, this allows release changelogs where history is not terminated by release candidate tags.

Optional Commit-ish object name(s) to describe.

Default: HEAD~

A commit-ish value is any which may point to a commit in git. You're probably already familiar with these (HEAD, HEAD~, HEAD^, @{ 2 weeks ago }, etc.). Check git's documentation for more details.

By default, git describe will point to HEAD which may result in the current tag on release builds. A user may want the current tag without manipulating GITHUB_REF as provided by GitHub Actions Environment Variables; pass commit-ish: "HEAD" as an input and ignore the warning logged by this action.

Optional Skip the unshallow operation: "true" or "false"

Default: false

This option allows for users who have already performed an unshallow operation to skip the additonal unshallow in this action. This is marked as optional because it will use default behavior if unspecified.

NOTE If you have already performed an unshallow in a previous step, you must pass skip-unshallow: "true" in any query-tag-action step following that unshallow. A future version may check and handle this logic gracefully without user input.

The tag determined by your inputs.

uses: jimschubert/query-tag-action@v1 with: who-to-greet: 'Mona the Octocat'

name: Tagged
on: [release]

jobs:

  my_job:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
    - name: Checkout
      uses: actions/checkout@v2
    # Optionally: unshallow as a separate operation
    # - name: Unshallow
    #   run: git fetch --prune --unshallow
    - name: Find Tag
      id: tagger
      uses: jimschubert/query-tag-action@v1
      with:
        include: 'v*'
        exclude: '*-rc*'
        commit-ish: 'HEAD~'
        # if you unshallow in a separate step, use the following option:
        # skip-unshallow: 'true'
    - name: Show Tag
      id: display
      run: |
        echo 'Output from Find Tag: ${{steps.tagger.outputs.tag}}'

No automated tests are provided here because this action just builds a standard git describe command line invocation.

The example from above will produce the following command:

git fetch --prune --unshallow && git describe --tags --abbrev=0 --match 'v*' --exclude '*-rc*' HEAD~

The above command is built by the following parts:

• skip-unshallow determines whether to include the git fetch --prune --unshallow && command part
• include determines whether to generate --match and defines the value v*
• exclude determines whether to generate --exclude and defines the value *-rc*
• commit-ish determines whether to generate the command option HEAD~.

Please see tagged.yml for some use cases.

This project is licensed under Apache 2.0.