An example of using the git hash/tag as a version number

setup.py

from setuptools import setup, find_packages
import subprocess

def _get_version_hash():
  """Talk to git and find out the tag/hash of our latest commit"""
  try:
        p = subprocess.Popen(["git", "describe",
                              "--tags", "--dirty", "--always"],
                             stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
    except EnvironmentError:
        print("Couldn't run git to get a version number for setup.py")
        return
    ver = p.communicate()[0]
    return ver.strip()

setup(
    name='private-python-utils',
    version=_get_version_hash(),
    description='Our internal python utils library'
  # And all of the other fields
)