Where do you store your Rails Application's version number?

My strategy is to let your VCS tags do it for you (git shown here).

Add this to your application.rb:

# Only attempt update on local machine
if Rails.env.development?
  # Update version file from latest git tag
  File.open('config/version', 'w') do |file|
    file.write `git describe --tags --always` # or equivalent
  end
end

config.version = File.read('config/version')

You can then access the version anywhere in your app with Rails.configuration.version

I don't really think there's any convention for this. I guess it's all about what seems natural to you.

Some places the version number can be placed are in:

• config/environment.rb
• config/application.rb
• config/initializers/version.rb

by adding:

VERSION = '1.0.0'

Regardless of which option you choose (from above) - the VERSION constant will be set at the initialization of the app.

For my blog I just update the footer of my layout - as the version number isn't used anywhere else.

The lib-folder does sound a bit strange though, as this folder is meant to store re-usable modules.

My preference is to create a rake task that generates

# config/initializers/version.rb
VERSION = ["1", "0", "f3d9da7"]

FWIW, my rake task:

task :create_version do
  desc "create VERSION.  Use MAJOR_VERSION, MINOR_VERSION, BUILD_VERSION to override defaults"

  version_file = "#{Rails.root}/config/initializers/version.rb"
  major = ENV["MAJOR_VERSION"] || 1
  minor = ENV["MINOR_VERSION"] || 0
  build = ENV["BUILD_VERSION"] || `git describe --always --tags`
  version_string = "VERSION = #{[major.to_s, minor.to_s, build.strip]}\n"
  File.open(version_file, "w") {|f| f.print(version_string)}
  $stderr.print(version_string)
end