git-changelog is a tool to automate repository changelog generation.
A commit like this generates an output like this
Motivation
Commit messages must be meaningful in any case and with a little extra tidiness we can automate the chore of generating change meaningful logs for end-users. As we finish up work on a change, I like to pause a while, thing of what it means to the end-user and reorganize the message a bit. A little time spent at commit time saves a lot of time at release milestones by bootstrapping an accurate report of all work the done in the repository.
Installation
> cargo
Usage
Just write your commits as you normally do. When it looks like a particular commit includes a change that the "user" may be interested in, tag it appropriately.
Concretely, instead of writing this:
Add support for filtering responses
UI gets a bit cluttered when the response contains too many items.
Added a simple filtering scheme to reduce the result set to a
more relevant subset. Clients using v1.2 need to upgrade to
accomodate the new request parameter.
Write this:
Add support for filtering responses
- feature: UI gets a bit cluttered when the response
contains too many items. Added a simple filtering scheme
to reduce the result set to a more relevant subset.
- break: Clients using v1.2 need to upgrade to accomodate
the new request parameter.
They're both the same but the latter tags visible (from the user's perspective) changes. The tool picks up these tags, gathers similar things (e.g. breaking changes) together and gives you a report that you can share with users. Tags are optional, and you're free to tag as much or as little as you see useful.
Of course, you don't need to do this for every commit (git commit -m is perfectly fine, where
it is). You just need to tag the change you want your users to know about.
Generate reports
To generate report you specify a commit range and the tool looks for all commits in the range and uses the ones with the tags (ignoring others that don't) to generate a report.
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The default revision range picks all commits made since the last tag.
Customization
-
Tags: You can specify a configuration file to define the tags and scopes you want to use for your project. See the default configuration file for a starting example.
-
Template: You can specify a [Handlerbars] template to control the rendered report structure. The default template generates a Markdown document that renders well on Github.