Unable to use gitversion as part of AppVeyor build

[Kimserey]

Description

I am unable to use Gitversion as part of my build to version my application.
What are the recommendation to use gitversion as part of AppVeyor build to version .NET application?

Steps

At the beginning of the build, AppVeyor clones the repository and checkouts out the commit meant to be built:

git clone -q --branch=[my branch] https://[my repo].git C:\projects\[...]
git checkout -qf [commit to build]

But when Gitversion runs I see the following error:

INFO [09/17/18 9:35:55:42] Running against branch: (no branch) ([commit to build])
WARN [09/17/18 9:35:55:42] An error occurred:
It looks like the branch being examined is a detached Head pointing to commit '[commit]'. Without a proper branch name GitVersion cannot determine the build version.

I tried then using dynamic repository but it wouldn't checkout the branch on the right commit, for example:

gitversion /url [url] /b test-gitversion /c 68264bd15c7364c3f3e53c764260776d4706d288

---

* 317aab8 (origin/test-gitversion, test-gitversion) removed another comment
* 68264bd (HEAD) removed comment
* 1570202 (tag: 1.15.5-alpha.1) Try to resolve first variable from local repository before trying dynamic.
* f77f974 (origin/master, origin/HEAD, master) removed more

It would checkout test-branch on the same level as master branch f77f974 and not 68264bd.

[Kimserey]

I managed to use a workaround by checking out into a branch name alpha part of the before_build step.

before_build:
  - cmd: git checkout -b alpha
  - cmd: gitversion /l console /output buildserver

And naming my alpha tag 1.0.0-alpha.1, 1.0.0-alpha.2, 1.0.0-alpha.3,... works as expected.

[dazinator]

Odd. I have used gitversion with appveyor in various projects and not needed any additional git checkout commands.

For example, I use it here in DotNet.Glob: https://ci.appveyor.com/project/dazinator/dotnet-glob/branch/master

Here is my appveyor.yml: https://github.com/dazinator/DotNet.Glob/blob/develop/appveyor.yml

[Kimserey]

Thanks @dazinator, I can see from DotNet.Glob that even branches versions can be found.

Would you know in which scenario I would get the error It looks like the branch being examined is a detached Head pointing to commit '[commit]'. Without a proper branch name GitVersion cannot determine the build version.?

[dazinator]

@Kimserey afraid not but if I had to guess it sounds related to how the build server is checking out the repo - i.e in your case its in detached head mode. Perhaps its worth you asking the AppVeyor folks why your build would be different from my AppVeyor build in this regard..

[Kimserey]

Hi @dazinator ,

I had a look and it seems like the problem arise in the following circumstances:

1. Push commit to master
2. Build is triggered
3. Push quickly another commit to master before Build starts
4. When build starts, it is no longer triggered on latest master therefore checkout on detached head
5. Gitversion not able to deduce the version with the message It looks like the branch being examined is a detached Head pointing to commit '1d11d84'. Without a proper branch name GitVersion cannot determine the build version.

Is it intended to behave this way or have I got the scenario wrong?

Thanks!

PS: I appreciate that you left the comment open even though it's been 2 months! Thanks a lot for your patience.

---

On another note, I also can't get it to work on VSO (or also known as Azure Devops 😄).

The commit gets checkout as a detached branch, here's in the default command to checkout repository:

2018-12-07T09:23:41.9074804Z ##[command]git remote add origin https://github.com/Kimserey/dummy-api.git
2018-12-07T09:23:41.9099845Z ##[command]git fetch --tags --prune --progress --no-recurse-submodules origin
2018-12-07T09:23:43.2337154Z ##[command]git checkout --progress --force c506a20ba0ff0d6ab3d30b89919310ea056d3488

Commit c506a20ba0ff0d6ab3d30b89919310ea056d3488 is the latest commit on master branch.

Which then result in the detached Head error message.

---

It seems to be related to the fact that it is in a detached branch and that the current checkout commit is on two different branches. This is the few last lines of the warning:

INFO [12/07/18 10:02:58:52] Using latest commit on specified branch
INFO [12/07/18 10:02:58:52] Begin: Getting branches containing the commit 'c506a20ba0ff0d6ab3d30b89919310ea056d3488'.
  INFO [12/07/18 10:02:58:52] Trying to find direct branches.
  INFO [12/07/18 10:02:58:52] No direct branches found, searching through tracked branches.
  INFO [12/07/18 10:02:58:52] Searching for commits reachable from 'origin/gitversion-test-branch'.
  INFO [12/07/18 10:02:58:53] The branch 'origin/gitversion-test-branch' has a matching commit.
  INFO [12/07/18 10:02:58:53] Searching for commits reachable from 'origin/master'.
  INFO [12/07/18 10:02:58:53] The branch 'origin/master' has a matching commit.
INFO [12/07/18 10:02:58:53] End: Getting branches containing the commit 'c506a20ba0ff0d6ab3d30b89919310ea056d3488'. (Took: 7.97ms)
INFO [12/07/18 10:02:58:54] Running against branch: (no branch) (c506a20ba0ff0d6ab3d30b89919310ea056d3488)
WARN [12/07/18 10:02:58:54] An error occurred:
It looks like the branch being examined is a detached Head pointing to commit 'c506a20'. Without a proper branch name GitVersion cannot determine the build version.

[dazinator]

@JakeGinnivan @asbjornu @gep13 any ideas?
I wasn't aware appveyor checked out in detached head mode if the commit was non current.

[gep13]

@dazinator I wasn't aware of this, and I can't say that I have seen this happen on any of the repositories that I run in AppVeyor, where GitVersion is being used.

[asbjornu]

Weird. I've never encountered this either. Either way, I believe #1243 or #1244 might be a solution to problems like these.

[Kimserey]

Hi guys, thanks a lot for the follow up.

I guess my question now changes slightly toward how to deal with repository like my test repository Kimserey/dummy-api.git whereby the last commit is on two branches.

Is there a way to make GitVersion able to recognize the version even though the CI Server checks out on detached branch (talking about VSO here).

VSO is executing the following commands, which if reproduced locally would yield the error:

git init
git remote add origin https://github.com/Kimserey/dummy-api.git
git fetch --tags --prune --progress --no-recurse-submodules origin
git checkout --progress --force c506a20ba0ff0d6ab3d30b89919310ea056d3488

@asbjornu , thanks a lot for the pointers but I couldn't understand how it relates and how I can use it?

[asbjornu]

@Kimserey, there's nothing in those pull requests you can use yet, I was mostly referencing them to know which issues we might solve by finalizing them. 😃 To indicate which Git reference (branch or tag) a given commit is being built for, you provide GitVersion with the environment variable Git_Branch. I can see that information is missing from AppVeyor, but you can read about it in the TeamCity documentation.

[asbjornu]

I just had the same experience with a PR build on Travis, so this doesn't seem to be exclusive to AppVeyor. #1314, #1501 and #1523 all seem to be about the same issue, indicating that this is something we ought to fix in GitVersion. Even setting the environment variable Git_Branch seems to have no effect, which is odd.

[dennisdoomen]

I've experienced the same thing with GitVersion 4.0 on both TeamCity as well as AppVeyor. For TC, I managed to get it to work by using the teamcity.git.fetchAllHeads=true option. However, there does not seem to be a workaround for AppVeyor. I had to manually build the latest version of Fluent Assertions and push it to NuGet.

In all scenarios, it looks like it is indeed caused by building a tag from a branch that already has successive commits as explained by @Kimserey in #1477 (comment).

The same problem did not happen with GitVersion 3.x.