Resetting Build Number in Appveyor

Published on Tuesday, May 9, 2017

I've been using AppVeyor for a while now to be my CI platform of choice for my OSS projects. It's like any other tool. It works, and does a lot of things very well. I recently bumped some major version numbers up and realized that some things AppVeyor was automating weren't completely automated.

Build numbers. AppVeyor takes on the burden of incrementing a build number for you (and updating your AssemblyInfo and Nuget info, if you want). Unfortunately that's all it does automatically with the build number. If I change my version number (e.g. from 1.0 to 2.0) then the build number does not reset to zero but continues on with the next version (so I go from 1.0.34 to 2.0.35). Not what I was expecting. Not that big a deal; but when it also publishes Nuget packages; kinda leaves you stuck at contining on from that point.

I've seen a couple threads on the topic, but the result always seemed to get pointed to the API to reset the build number. I kinda think this violated the Principle of Least Surprise, so I decided to dig in a bit to avoid the surprise the future.

The problem turned out to be fairly easy to solve (easier if you're an expert in PowerShell). Basically, the way I approached it was to add a script in the Init script section of the configuration to get the last build version via the API and compare the components of that version to the current build verison found in the environment.

This is the result:

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