Releases
Each branch of your repository is considered to be a specific release, and packages built from branch A will be isolated from packages built from branch B. This allows you to provide packages at different degrees of stability.
You can enable more branches to package in your project settings. You must have administration rights on the repository.
For instance, you may already have two branches in your repository, let's say master and stable. In master you have the most recent code, not necessarily production ready, while the stable branch only gets new code once it is considered stable enough.
In that case, you can enable both branches in your project settings, and independent packages will be built for both branches whenever new code is pushed. Then, you can use the packages from master to deploy to staging or let adventurous users try out the latest features, while your production servers or clients will use the packages from the stable release to install your application.
Versions
Within a Release, packages will be versioned according to:
- the time at which they have been generated
- a version number, based on the latest git tag reachable from the git commit that has been packaged
If a proper tag can't be reached from the commit being packaged, the version number will be set to 0.0.0. So make sure you always push your tags with git push --tags.