Can read project version from a file.versionfromfile

2 files changed, 15 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/docs/markdown/Reference-manual.md b/docs/markdown/Reference-manual.md
index f758e71e5..f26466d8f 100644
--- a/docs/markdown/Reference-manual.md
+++ b/docs/markdown/Reference-manual.md
@@ -1432,7 +1432,9 @@ Project supports the following keyword arguments.
 
 - `version`: which is a free form string describing the version of
   this project. You can access the value in your Meson build files
-  with `meson.project_version()`.
+  with `meson.project_version()`. Since 0.57.0 this can also be a
+  `File` object pointing to a file that contains exactly one line of
+  text.
 
 ### run_command()
 
diff --git a/docs/markdown/snippets/versionfile.md b/docs/markdown/snippets/versionfile.md
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..6071f2cfb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/docs/markdown/snippets/versionfile.md
@@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
+## Project version can be specified with a file
+
+Meson can be instructed to load project's version string from an
+external file like this:
+
+```meson
+project('foo', 'c' version: files('VERSION'))
+```
+
+The version file must contain exactly one line of text and that will
+be set as the project's version. If the line ends in a newline
+character, it is removed.