Incremental is a small library that versions your Python projects.

API documentation can be found here.

Add Incremental to your pyproject.toml:

[build-system]
requires = [
    "setuptools",
    "incremental>=24.7.2",  # ← Add incremental as a build dependency
]
build-backend = "setuptools.build_meta"

[project]
name = "<projectname>"
dynamic = ["version"]     # ← Mark the version dynamic
dependencies = [
    "incremental>=24.7.2",  # ← Depend on incremental at runtime
]
# ...

[tool.incremental]        # ← Activate Incremental's setuptools plugin

It's fine if the [tool.incremental] table is empty, but it must be present.

Remove any [project] version = entry and any [tool.setuptools.dynamic] version = entry.

Next, initialize the project.

If you're using Hatchling to package your project, activate Incremental's Hatchling plugin by altering your pyproject.toml:

[build-system]
requires = [
    "hatchling",
    "incremental>=24.7.2",  # ← Add incremental as a build dependency
]
build-backend = "hatchling.build"

[project]
name = "<projectname>"
dynamic = ["version"]     # ← Mark the version dynamic
dependencies = [
    "incremental>=24.7.2",  # ← Depend on incremental at runtime
]
# ...

[tool.hatch.version]
source = "incremental"    # ← Activate Incremental's Hatchling plugin

Incremental can be configured as usual in an optional [tool.incremental] table.

The hatch version command will report the Incremental-managed version. Use the python -m incremental.update command to change the version (setting it with hatch version is not supported).

Next, initialize the project.

Incremental may be used from setup.py instead of pyproject.toml. Add this to your setup() call, removing any other versioning arguments:

setup(
    use_incremental=True,
    setup_requires=['incremental'],
    install_requires=['incremental'], # along with any other install dependencies
    ...
}

Then initialize the project.

Install Incremental to your local environment with pip install incremental[scripts]. Then run python -m incremental.update <projectname> --create. It will create a file in your package named _version.py like this:

from incremental import Version

__version__ = Version("<projectname>", 24, 1, 0)
__all__ = ["__version__"]

Then, so users of your project can find your version, in your root package's __init__.py add:

from ._version import __version__

Subsequent installations of your project will then use Incremental for versioning.

incremental.Version is a class that represents a version of a given project. It is made up of the following elements (which are given during instantiation):

• package (required), the name of the package this Version represents.
• major, minor, micro (all required), the X.Y.Z of your project's Version.
• release_candidate (optional), set to 0 or higher to mark this Version being of a release candidate (also sometimes called a "prerelease").
• post (optional), set to 0 or higher to mark this Version as a postrelease.
• dev (optional), set to 0 or higher to mark this Version as a development release.

You can extract a PEP-440 compatible version string by using the .public() method, which returns a str containing the full version. This is the version you should provide to users, or publicly use. An example output would be "13.2.0", "17.1.2dev1", or "18.8.0rc2".

Calling repr() with a Version will give a Python-source-code representation of it, and calling str() on a Version produces a string like '[Incremental, version 16.10.1]'.

Incremental includes a tool to automate updating your Incremental-using project's version called incremental.update. It updates the _version.py file and automatically updates some uses of Incremental versions from an indeterminate version to the current one. It requires click from PyPI.

python -m incremental.update <projectname> will perform updates on that package. The commands that can be given after that will determine what the next version is.

• --newversion=<version>, to set the project version to a fully-specified version (like 1.2.3, or 17.1.0dev1).
• --rc, to set the project version to <year-2000>.<month>.0rc1 if the current version is not a release candidate, or bump the release candidate number by 1 if it is.
• --dev, to set the project development release number to 0 if it is not a development release, or bump the development release number by 1 if it is.
• --patch, to increment the patch number of the release. This will also reset the release candidate number, pass --rc at the same time to increment the patch number and make it a release candidate.
• --post, to set the project postrelease number to 0 if it is not a postrelease, or bump the postrelease number by 1 if it is. This will also reset the release candidate and development release numbers.

If you give no arguments, it will strip the release candidate number, making it a "full release".

Incremental supports "indeterminate" versions, as a stand-in for the next "full" version. This can be used when the version which will be displayed to the end-user is unknown (for example "introduced in" or "deprecated in"). Incremental supports the following indeterminate versions:

• Version("<projectname>", "NEXT", 0, 0)
• <projectname> NEXT

When you run python -m incremental.update <projectname> --rc, these will be updated to real versions (assuming the target final version is 17.1.0):

• Version("<projectname>", 17, 1, 0, release_candidate=1)
• <projectname> 17.1.0rc1

Once the final version is made, it will become:

• Version("<projectname>", 17, 1, 0)
• <projectname> 17.1.0