git-changelog is a tool to automate repository changelog generation.
A commit like this generates an output like this.
Motivation
Commit messages must always be meaningful and with a little extra effort we can automate the chore of generating meaningful change logs for end-users. As I finish up work on a change, I like to pause a while, consider what the change means to the end-user and reorganize the message a bit. If you follow the (easy) conventions described below and tag lines appropriately, the tool will help you generate an accurate and presentable change log.
A little time spent at the time of commit, when the context and impact of the change is fresh in mind, saves a lot of time at release milestones.
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 accommodate
the new request parameter.
They're both the same but the latter tags user visible changes diligently. The tool picks up these tags, aggregates similar tags (e.g. breaking changes) together, orders them, and gives you a report that you can share with users.
Of course, you don't need to do this for every commit (git commit -m is perfectly fine, where
you think it is). You just need to tag the changes you want your users to know about. If configured,
even the tags optional and you're free to tag as much or as little as you see useful.
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.
> git
)
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 format. The default template generates a Markdown document that renders well on Github.