Output

By default GitVersion returns a json object to stdout containing all the variables which GitVersion generates. This works great if you want to get your build scripts to parse the json object then use the variables, but there is a simpler way.

GitVersion.exe /output buildserver will change the mode of GitVersion to write out the variables to whatever build server it is running in. You can then use those variables in your build scripts or run different tools to create versioned NuGet packages or whatever you would like to do. See build servers for more information about this.

You can even store the variables in a Dotenv file and load it to have the variables available in your environment. For that you have to run GitVersion.exe /output dotenv and store the output into e.g. a gitversion.env file. These files can also be passed around in CI environments like GitHub or GitLab. Below are some examples of using the Dotenv format in the Unix command line:

# Output version variables in Dotenv format
gitversion /output dotenv

# Show only a subset of the version variables in Dotenv format
gitversion /output dotenv | grep -i "prerelease"

# Show only a subset of the version variables that match the regex in Dotenv format
gitversion /output dotenv | grep -iE "major|sha=|_prerelease"

# Write version variables in Dotenv format into a file
gitversion /output dotenv > gitversion.env