A neat trick to zip a git repo with a version number

I have this WebExtension addon. It's not very important. Just a web extension that does some hacks to GitHub pages when I open them in Firefox. The web extension is a folder with a manifest.json, icons/icon-48.png, tricks.js, README.md etc. To upload it to addons.mozilla.org I first have to turn the whole thing into a .zip file that I can upload.

So I discovered a neat way to make that zip file. It looks like this:

#!/bin/bash

DESTINATION=build-`cat manifest.json | jq -r .version`.zip
git archive --format=zip master > $DESTINATION

echo "Created..."
ls -lh $DESTINATION

You run it and it creates a build-1.0.zip file containing all the files that are checked into the git repo. So it discards my local "junk" such as backup files or other things that are mentioned in .gitignore (and .git/info/exclude).

I bet someone's going to laugh and say "Duhh! Of course!" but I didn't know you can do that easily. Hopefully posting this it'll help someone trying to do something similar.

Note; this depends on jq which is an amazing little program.