Increment Build and Version in PSake

The task

I have been having a lot of fun playing around with PSake for a few weeks now, and I am pretty close to having automated my entire workflow for building Powershell Modules.

Yesterday I wanted to update a module on the Powershell Gallery, but the publish command failed, because I hadn’t updated the version number in my module manifest. This was not the first time that happend.

After a quick browse in the documentation, I found no built-in way to do this, so I set out to build auto-incrementation of Build, Minor and Major versions.

The solution

Thanks to the great work of the team behind PSakes and especially Brandon Olin, the strict syntax and logical structure of PSake allowed me to do just that in very few lines of code.

I find that using the properties scriptblock in the top of my PSake file holding the variables I use throughout my tasks, is the easiest way to handle the many variables. For the purpose of updating the build number I only need to know the path to the psd1 file, so I have this:

properties {
    # This needs to be updated to fit your build
    $psd1 = $ModuleRootFolder\MyModule.psd1
}

Variables in the properties block are in the script scope and available to all tasks.

I then added the following task to my PSAke task:

Task IncrementVersion {
    # Get the current Version object of the module
    $CurrentVersion = Test-ModuleManifest $Script:psd1 | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Version
    # Unfortunately there is no way of incrementing a Version object,so you have to:
    # Get the Build, Minor and Major version,
    $Build = $ModuleManifestVersion.Build
    $Minor = $ModuleManifestVersion.Minor
    $Major = $ModuleManifestVersion.Major
    # increment it
    $Build++
    # create a new Version object
    $NewVersion = [System.Version]$("{0}.{1}.{2}" -f $Major,$Minor,$Build)
    # and finally update the module mainfest with the new Version
    Update-ModuleManifest -Path $psm1 -ModuleVersion $NewVersion
}

Easy-peasy, but I also wanted to be able to update minor and major versions on demand, without having to write a new task for that. Another dive in the documentation revealed, that PSake has a parameter switch, that takes a hashtable and turns them into variables in the task.

I added a little more logic to the task, and ended up with this:

Now I run my daily builds with the IncrementVersion in the dependencies of my Build task like this:

Invoke-PSake -buildFile .\MyModule.psake.ps1 Build

And if I want to update the major version I just need to add the parameter for IncrementMajorVersion like this:

Invoke-PSake -buildFile .\MyModule.psake.ps1 Build  -parameters @{"IncrementMajorVersion" = $true}

Now my builds are always updated and ready for the Powershell Gallery.