vert: A command-line version comparison tool

vert (Version Tester) is a simple command line tool for comparing two or more versions, or testing versions against fuzzy version rules.

Basic Usage

Vert takes at least two arguments: A base version, and one or more versions to compare to the base. The base version is special, in that it can be a fuzzy version specification rather than an exact version.

$ vert 1.0.0 1.0.0
1.0.0
$ echo $?
0

When vert runs, it will print a normalized string of any version that matches, and then will set the exit code to the number of version match failures that it saw.

vert understands SemVer v2 versions, so the following will also pass:

$ vert v1.0.0 1
1.0.0
$ echo $?
0

There are three things to note:

• A leading v is ignored.
• Numbers are expanded to a full SemVer string, thus 1 is expanded to 1.0.0 and 1.1 is expaneded to 1.1.0
• The output is normalized to the form X.Y.Z[-PRERELEASE][+BUILD]

A failed comparison looks like this:

$ vert 1.0.0 1.2.0
$ echo $?
1

Failed version comparisons to not print any text unless the given base version is malformed:

$ vert 1.zoo.cheese 1.1.1
Could not parse constraint 1.zoo.cheese

Base versions can be fuzzy:

• vert ">1.0" 1.1
• vert "^2" 2.1.3
• vert ">1.1.2,<1.3.4" 1.2

And vert understands alpha/beta markers:

vert ">1.0.0-alpha.1" 1.0.0-beta.1
1.0.0-beta.1

Multiple versions can be compared at once, and using the -s flag, you can even sort the output:

$ vert ^1 1.1.1 1.0.1 1.2.3 1.0.2 0.9 2.0
1.1.1
1.0.1
1.2.3
1.0.2
$ echo $?
2

In the above, we asked vert for all of the version in the 1.X.Y range (^1), and then gave it a list of versions, including some outside of that range.

vert returned a list of versions that match. Via the return code, we can see that two failed to match. To see which failed, we can use the -f flag:

$ vert -f ^1 1.1.1 1.0.1 1.2.3 1.0.2 0.9 2.0
0.9.0
2.0.0

We can sort output using the -s flag:

vert -s ^1 1.1.1 1.0.1 1.2.3 1.0.2 0.9 2.0
1.0.1
1.0.2
1.1.1
1.2.3

Finally, vert can transform git describe versions into SemVer, assuming the Git tags are SemVer:

$ vert -g ^1 $(git describe --tags)
1.0.1+32.fef45

In the future, we'd like to add more transformations. If you have any ideas, please let us know in the issue queue.

Installation

Assuming you have make, Go version 1.5.1 or later and dep, you can simply run make:

$ make all
dep ensure
dep status
PROJECT                        CONSTRAINT  VERSION  REVISION  LATEST   PKGS USED
github.com/Masterminds/semver  ^1.0.0      v1.4.0   15d8430   15d8430  1
github.com/urfave/cli          ^1.0.0      v1.20.0  cfb3883   cfb3883  1
go test .
ok      github.com/Masterminds/vert 0.006s
go build -o vert vert.go
install -d /usr/local/bin/
install -m 755 ./vert /usr/local/bin/vert

This will install into /usr/local/bin/vert.