README

Create, parse, increment and compare strict SemVer V2 version tags and other common semantic versioning formats found out in the wild

Motivation

SemVer V2 is a useful attempt to standardize semantic versioning. However semantic versioning itself predates it. Thus many semver-like formats exist and there is a real world need to handle them.

Common deviations from SemVer format:

• Treating a prerelease version "dev" as inferior to alpha. SemVer V2 says alphabetic prepatch components are compared by string, thus alpha < beta < dev < rc
• Prerelease versions without a hyphen after the patch version number are common
• Version strings with only major.minor sometimes need to be compared to specific versions, especially as part of version requirement strings
• SemVer v2 splits components of prerelease versions by dots but out there, "alpha4" is much more common than "alpha.4"
• Prefixes like v before the actual version are treated as not being part of SemVer V2 but strings containing these are common.
• Some inhouse schemes support sub-patch versions (Major.Minor.Patch.SubPatch) to denote rebuilds of equivalent source code versions on changed tool chains

Usage

Handle a string as a strict SemVerV2 object

// works
$version = new SemVerV2('1.0.0');
$version = new SemVerV2('1.0.0-alpha.1');
$version = new SemVerV2('1.0.0-alpha.1+transpiled.to.php.7.4');
// fails
$version = new SemVerV2('1.0');
$version = new SemVerV2('v1.0.0');
$version = new SemVerV2('1.0.0alpha1');

Handle a string as a relaxed Semantion Version

// works
$version = new RelaxedSemanticVersion('1.0.0');
$version = new RelaxedSemanticVersion('1.0.0-alpha.1');
$version = new RelaxedSemanticVersion('1.0.0-alpha.1+transpiled.to.php.7.4');
// Is treated as 1.0.0
$version = new RelaxedSemanticVersion('1.0');
// Is treated as 1.0.0
$version = new SemVerV2('v1.0.0');
// is treated as 1.0.0-alpha1
$version = new SemVerV2('1.0.0alpha1');

Origin

A similar implementation existed in

• horde/components Developer CLI

But it was not practical for other use cases.