BUILD_INFO - best practices to show the deployed version, deploy time etc

[tillcarlos]

Hello all

Showing the version of the current deployment makes debugging easier. It gives testers confidence that they are working on the correct version.

My Main Question: What's the best practice to achieve this?

I am trying to find an elegant way to do this. What does work for me is this:

• make a bin/generate_build_info.sh file that generates a json file with appname, version, deployment_time, ...
• the file BUILD_INFO.json is not in git (makes sense)
• Running this on my gitlab-ci.yml pipeline and sending it through an AWS function to notify me via email
• have a pre-commit script that runs, in case I deploy from my machine
• (I can share the file if anyone cares)

What's a bit hard is this:

• It worked with kamal 1.8.3 - but I'm not exactly sure where the difference was. Might be on my side.
• Kamal bundles the current app folder, and it doesn't include the file in the build

Has anyone seen a great solution that we can adopt as a semi standard for all our deployments?

[tillcarlos]

Okay, after several hours of trying:

• attaching a file after the build doesn't make sense
• As far as I understand: you cannot call git from within docker, nor does it make sense
• Easiest approach: use an ENV variable.

Josef said "I wouldn't try to attach a file to it, although you technically could.": https://x.com/strzibnyj/status/1845363108765671713

My solution is the following now:

Placing a JSON string into ENV and reading it into the admin dashboard:

module DeployedVersionHelper
  def read_build_info
    # Default to empty JSON string if BUILD_INFO is not set
    build_info = ENV.fetch("BUILD_INFO", "{}")
    JSON.parse(build_info)
  rescue JSON::ParserError, Errno::ENOENT => e
    {
      contents: build_info,
      error: e.to_s
    }
  end
end

This gets called from the gitlab CI, but also in a post-commit hook:

generate_build_info.sh

https://gist.github.com/tillcarlos/7a9944a186e0b0c0df04223a496f9961

I deploy with this command: dotenv -f '.env,.env.build' kamal deploy -d production

If someone wants more details, I'm happy to share. Right now, I'd consider this as closed. Thanks everyone!