diff --git a/.gitignore b/.gitignore
index a7c457714..9546cffd9 100644
--- a/.gitignore
+++ b/.gitignore
@@ -113,6 +113,7 @@ ENV/
 /fairseq/temporal_convolution_tbc
 /fairseq/modules/*_layer/*_forward.cu
 /fairseq/modules/*_layer/*_backward.cu
+/fairseq/version.py
 
 # data
 data-bin/
diff --git a/docs/conf.py b/docs/conf.py
index 52971a27e..440784bfa 100644
--- a/docs/conf.py
+++ b/docs/conf.py
@@ -19,6 +19,7 @@
 
 import os
 import sys
+from fairseq import __version__
 
 
 # source code directory, relative to this file, for sphinx-autobuild
@@ -51,7 +52,7 @@ master_doc = "index"
 
 # General information about the project.
 project = "fairseq"
-copyright = "2019, Facebook AI Research (FAIR)"
+copyright = "Facebook AI Research (FAIR)"
 author = "Facebook AI Research (FAIR)"
 
 github_doc_root = "https://github.com/pytorch/fairseq/tree/master/docs/"
@@ -61,9 +62,9 @@ github_doc_root = "https://github.com/pytorch/fairseq/tree/master/docs/"
 # built documents.
 #
 # The short X.Y version.
-version = "0.9.0"
+version = __version__
 # The full version, including alpha/beta/rc tags.
-release = "0.9.0"
+release = __version__
 
 # The language for content autogenerated by Sphinx. Refer to documentation
 # for a list of supported languages.
diff --git a/examples/__init__.py b/examples/__init__.py
index 9a6b08a75..80d95f5fe 100644
--- a/examples/__init__.py
+++ b/examples/__init__.py
@@ -3,6 +3,4 @@
 # This source code is licensed under the MIT license found in the
 # LICENSE file in the root directory of this source tree.
 
-__version__ = "0.9.0"
-
-import examples.noisychannel  # noqa
+from fairseq.version import __version__  # noqa
diff --git a/fairseq/__init__.py b/fairseq/__init__.py
index cac3d0e43..4ccfc9025 100644
--- a/fairseq/__init__.py
+++ b/fairseq/__init__.py
@@ -4,11 +4,18 @@
 # LICENSE file in the root directory of this source tree.
 """isort:skip_file"""
 
-__all__ = ["pdb"]
-__version__ = "1.0.0a0"
-
+import os
 import sys
 
+try:
+    from .version import __version__  # noqa
+except ImportError:
+    version_txt = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), "version.txt")
+    with open(version_txt) as f:
+        __version__ = f.read().strip()
+
+__all__ = ["pdb"]
+
 # backwards compatibility to support `from fairseq.meters import AverageMeter`
 from fairseq.logging import meters, metrics, progress_bar  # noqa
 
diff --git a/fairseq/version.txt b/fairseq/version.txt
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..41432f00d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/fairseq/version.txt
@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+1.0.0a0
diff --git a/setup.py b/setup.py
index edc019671..7b13f13e4 100644
--- a/setup.py
+++ b/setup.py
@@ -5,7 +5,9 @@
 # LICENSE file in the root directory of this source tree.
 
 import os
+import subprocess
 import sys
+from setuptools import setup, find_packages, Extension
 
 from setuptools import Extension, find_packages, setup
 
@@ -14,6 +16,26 @@ if sys.version_info < (3, 6):
     sys.exit("Sorry, Python >= 3.6 is required for fairseq.")
 
 
+def write_version_py():
+    with open(os.path.join("fairseq", "version.txt")) as f:
+        version = f.read().strip()
+
+    # append latest commit hash to version string
+    try:
+        sha = subprocess.check_output(["git", "rev-parse", "HEAD"]).decode("ascii").strip()
+        version += "+" + sha[:7]
+    except Exception:
+        pass
+
+    # write version info to fairseq/version.py
+    with open(os.path.join("fairseq", "version.py"), "w") as f:
+        f.write("__version__ = \"{}\"\n".format(version))
+    return version
+
+
+version = write_version_py()
+
+
 with open("README.md") as f:
     readme = f.read()
 
@@ -130,7 +152,7 @@ if "clean" in sys.argv[1:]:
 def do_setup(package_data):
     setup(
         name="fairseq",
-        version="0.9.0",
+        version=version,
         description="Facebook AI Research Sequence-to-Sequence Toolkit",
         url="https://github.com/pytorch/fairseq",
         classifiers=[