changelog-maker

A git log to CHANGELOG.md tool

Eh?

changelog-maker is a formalisation of the Node.js CHANGELOG.md entry process but flexible enough to be used on other repositories.

changelog-maker will look at the git log of the current directory, pulling entries since the last tag. Commits with just a version number in the summary are removed, as are commits prior to, and including summaries that say working on (this is an io.js / Node ism).

After collecting the list of commits, any that have PR-URL: in them are looked up on GitHub and the labels of the pull request are collected, specifically looking for labels that start with semver (the assumption is that semver-minor, semver-major labels are used to indicate non-patch version bumps).

Finally, the list is formatted as Markdown and printed to stdout.

Each commit will come out something like this (on one line):

* [[`20f8e7f17a`](https://github.com/nodejs/io.js/commit/20f8e7f17a)] -
  **test**: remove flaky test functionality (Rod Vagg)
  [#812](https://github.com/nodejs/io.js/pull/812)

Note:

• When running changelog-maker on the command-line, the default GitHub repo is computed from the package.json that exists on cwd, otherwise fallback to nodejs/node, you can change this by supplying the user/org as the first argument and project as the second. e.g changelog-maker joyent node.
• Commit links will go to the assumed repo (default: nodejs/node)
• If a commit summary starts with a word, followed by a :, this is treated as a special label and rendered in bold
• Commits that have semver* labels on the pull request referred to in their PR-URL have those labels printed out at the start of the summary, in bold, upper cased.
• Pull request URLs come from the PR-URL data, if it matches the assumed repo (default: nodejs/node) then just a # followed by the number, if another repo then a full user/project#number.

When printing to a console some special behaviours are invoked:

• Commits with a summary that starts with doc: are rendered in grey
• Commits that have a semver* label on the pull request referred to in their PR-URL are rendered in bold green

Install

npm i changelog-maker -g

Usage

changelog-maker [--plaintext|p] [--markdown|md] [--sha] [--group|-g] [--reverse] [--find-matching-prs] [--commit-url=] [--start-ref=] [--end-ref=] [github-user[, github-project]]

github-user and github-project should point to the GitHub repository that can be used to find the PR-URL data if just an issue number is provided and will also impact how the PR-URL issue numbers are displayed

• --format: dictates what formatting the output will have. Possible options are: simple, markdown, plaintext, messageonly and sha. The default is to print a simple output suitable for stdout.
  • simple: don't print full markdown output, good for console printing without the additional fluff.
  • sha: print only the 10-character truncated commit hashes.
  • plaintext: a very simple form, without commit details, implies --group.
  • markdown: a Markdown formatted from, with links and proper escaping.
  • messageonly: displays the commit message only, implies --group
• --sha: same as --format=sha.
• --plaintext: same as --format=plaintext.
• --markdown: same as --format=markdown.
• --messageonly: same as --format=messageonly.
• --group: reorder commits so that they are listed in groups where the xyz: prefix of the commit message defines the group. Commits are listed in original order within group.
• --reverse: reverse the order of commits when printed, does not work with --reverse
• --commit-url: pass in a url template which will be used to generate commit URLs for a repository not hosted in Github. {ref} is the placeholder that will be replaced with the commit, i.e. --commit-url=https://gitlab.com/myUser/myRepo/commit/{ref}
• --start-ref=: use the given git as a starting point rather than the _last tag_. The can be anything commit-ish including a commit sha, tag, branch name. If you specify a --start-ref argument the commit log will not be pruned so that version commits and working on commits are left in the list.
• --end-ref=: use the given git as a end-point rather than the _now_. The can be anything commit-ish including a commit sha, tag, branch name.
• --filter-release: exclude Node-style release commits from the list. e.g. "Working on v1.0.0" or "2015-10-21 Version 2.0.0" and also "npm version X" style commits containing only an x.y.z semver designator.
• --find-matching-prs: use the GitHub API to find the pull requests that match commits that don't have the PR-URL metadata in their message text. Without metadata, it may be necessary to also pass the org/user and repo name on the commandline (as the github-user and github-project arguments as demonstrated above, it may also be necessary to use --find-matching-prs=true in this case).
• --quiet or -q: do not print to process.stdout
• --all or -a: process all commits since beginning, instead of last tag.
• --help or -h: show usage and help.

Development

Tests require GitHub authentication in order to fetch pull request metadata. ghauth will generate, store and load a personal access token in your local user configuration when changelog-maker is run during normal operation. To run the tests, you will need to ensure that you have a token in place. There are two ways to do this:

1. Run node ./changelog-maker.js -a to cause changelog-maker to fetch metadata on a commit with a PR-URL.

2. Manually generate a personal access token with public_repo scope. Then create a config.json file:

   {
     "user": "MY_GITHUB_USERNAME",
     "token": "MY_SECRET_TOKEN"
   }
   

   user is your username, and token is the token you generated above. The location of config.json depends on the OS, please see

License

changelog-maker is Copyright (c) 2015 Rod Vagg @rvagg and licenced under the MIT licence. All rights not explicitly granted in the MIT license are reserved. See the included LICENSE.md file for more details.