How to single-source a package's version when publishing to Pypi using Github Action?

[effigies (Chris Markiewicz)]

@bschubert

Usually I include something like the following in the top level __init__.py to make introspecting the installed version a bit easier:

DISTRIBUTION_NAME = "my-distribution-name"

__version__ = importlib.metadata.version(DISTRIBUTION_NAME)

For what it’s worth, this was strongly discouraged when I asked about it:

Dynamic versions in editable installations

I’m increasingly seeing the following idiom for single-sourcing versions: from importlib.metadata import version __version__ = version(__package__) Edit: Click for original idiom This makes total sense to me for installed packages, but I was curious about the interaction between dynamic versioning (e.g., based on git describe) and editable installations. Right now, if I manage my version with versioneer, then I can use an editable installation and the package can self-report the version based…

I think using versioneer or setuptools_scm (or versioningit, or …) should do what you want. Just make sure when using GitHub actions to checkout with full history, so that you get tags and enough history for git describe --tags to work properly.