---
id: dunamai
version: "1.26.2"
license: MIT
license_treatment: permissive
maintenance: active
---

# dunamai — Dynamic version generation

License: permissive · Maintenance: active · Downloads: 15.5M/mo

## What it is and what it does

Dunamai is a library and CLI tool that derives version strings from your version control system's tags, letting you avoid manually managing version numbers in code. It works with multiple VCS backends and outputs versions in PEP 440, Semantic Versioning, or custom formats—useful for CI/CD pipelines that need to uniquely identify nightly builds, per-commit releases, or production versions based solely on repository state.

The library provides both a programmatic API (the Version class) and a command-line interface. You can use it to generate a version at build time, embed it statically in your package, or compute it dynamically at runtime. It supports custom tag patterns, format templates, and version bumping, and works with projects in any language—for Python specifically, it means you don't need a setup.py to manage versions.

Use it for:

- Generate unique version identifiers for nightly or per-commit CI builds without manual tagging
- Automatically version releases by creating a git tag, eliminating manual version string updates
- Embed a dynamic version in a Python package's __version__ attribute at build or import time
- Validate custom version format strings against PEP 440 or Semantic Versioning standards
- Extract and inspect individual version components (base, stage, distance, commit hash) for conditional build logic

## Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts above — verify before relying.

Dunamai generates dynamic, standards-compliant version strings from version control system tags, supporting Git, Mercurial, Darcs, Subversion, Bazaar, Fossil, and Pijul with output in PEP 440, Semantic Versioning, or custom formats.

Yes. Dunamai is actively maintained, has no known vulnerabilities, minimal dependencies, and solves a real problem in CI/CD and release workflows. It's well-suited for projects that want version strings derived from VCS state without the overhead of Versioneer or manual version management. Install it if you need dynamic versioning tied to your repository tags.

## Install

pip install dunamai
uv add dunamai
poetry add dunamai

## Installing dunamai

Before you install: Low friction: pure Python wheel with only two runtime dependencies (packaging and importlib-metadata). Actively maintained with a recent release; last commit 2026-08-02.

License in practice: MIT license (permissive): you can use, modify, and distribute this package freely in commercial and private projects with minimal restrictions.

Quickstart:

pip install dunamai

from dunamai import Version
version = Version.from_any_vcs()
print(version.serialize())

Verify before relying:

- Whether all seven VCS backends (Git, Mercurial, Darcs, Subversion, Bazaar, Fossil, Pijul) are equally well-tested and production-ready
- Performance characteristics when run on very large repositories or in CI/CD pipelines with frequent invocations

## Package facts

- License: MIT (permissive)
- Python support: supports_current
- Install friction: low
- Maintenance: active
- Downloads: 15.5M/month (top 5,000 on PyPI)
- Known vulnerabilities: none known

## Tags

dynamic version from git tags, vcs-based version generation, pep 440 version strings, semantic versioning from vcs, automatic version bumping, ci/cd version tagging, version control system versioning, version-management, ci-cd, vcs-integration

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