Remember to update your Ruby Gem Version on every pull request

Gems are truly outrageous

So there you are, making some awesome changes to your Gem. You create a pull request. It gets approved. You merge.

And then it dawns on you. You forgot to bump the version.

Your CI/CD starts to fail and panic strikes as you fumble about trying to make another pull request just to bump the version and save the day.

We’ve all been there. Updating your Ruby Gem version is such a trivial task that happens on every pull request. Yet still we forget.

No more!

Introducing Version Forget-Me-Not

The Application Tooling team at Simply Business has created Version Forget-Me-Not – an open source GitHub Action, for the sole purpose of never having to remember to bump the version again. Because life’s too short for that.

And you can install it easily from the GitHub marketplace to use with your own Ruby Gems!

How it works

Once installed, every time you make a pull request but forget to bump the version, Version Forget-Me-Not will check to see whether your Gem’s version has been updated and stop you from merging your pull request if you’ve forgotten. It will look like this:

Forgot to update your Gem version? Version Forget-Me-Not will remind you.

As soon as you update the version, Version Forget-Me-Not will display a green tick, allowing you to merge:

This GitHub Action supports both the Gemspec and the version.rb file, so no matter how you manage your Gem’s version, Version Forget-Me-Not has got your back.

Installation

Installation is easy, just follow the instructions for Version Forget-Me-Not on the GitHub Marketplace.

Contributing

If you have any suggestions or improvements to Version Forget-Me-Not, feel free to raise a pull request at the open source repository on GitHub. Your contributions are welcome!

All in all, the engineering teams at Simply Business use the Version Forget-Me-Not GitHub Action extensively to maintain our Gems. We hope you find it as useful as we do!