Notes about CI/CD

We use Azure Pipelines for CI/CD. Every successful build from master branch is automatically published to NPM under @esy-nightly/esy name. We could,

1. Download the artifact directly from Azure Pipelines, or
2. Download the nightly npm tarball.

What is EsyVersion.re?

We infer esy version with git. A script, version.sh is present in esy-version/. This script can output a let statement in OCaml or Reason containing the version.

sh ./esy-version/version.sh --reason

Internally, it uses git describe --tags

During development, it's not absolutely necessary to run this script because .git/ is always present and Dune is configured extract it. This, however, is not true for CI as we develop for different platforms/distribution channels. Case in point, Nix and Docker. Even, esy release copies the source tree (without .git/) in isolation to prepare the npm tarball.

Therefore, on the CI, it's necessary to generate EsyVersion.re file containing the version with the version.sh script before running any of the build commands. You can see this in build-platform.yml right after the git clone job.

Note: you'll need the CI to fetch tags as it clones. By default, for instance, Github Actions only shallow clones the repository, which does not fetch tags. Fetching n number of commits during the shallow clone isn't helpful either. This is why, fetch-depth is set to 0 in the Nix Github Actions workflow. (nix.yml)