Release Notes
Generate release note pages from git commit history.
Installation
It's preferable to install it globally through npm
npm install -g git-release-notes
Usage
The basic usage is
cd <your_git_project>
git-release-notes <since>..<until> <template>
Where
<since>..<until>
specifies the range of commits as ingit log
, see gitrevisions(7)<template>
is an ejs template file used to generate the release notes
Three sample templates are included as a reference in the templates
folder
This for example is the release notes generated for joyent/node
by running
git-release-notes v0.9.8..v0.9.9 html > changelog.html
Custom template
The second parameter of git-release-notes
can be any path to a valid ejs template files.
Template Variables
Several template variables are made available to the script running inside the template.
commits
is an array of commits, each containing
sha1
commit hash (%H)authorName
author name (%an)authorEmail
author email (%ae)authorDate
author date (%aD)committerName
committer name (%cn)committerEmail
committer email (%ce)committerDate
committer date (%cD)title
subject (%s)messageLines
array of body lines (%b)
dateFnsFormat
is the date-fns format function. See the html-bootstrap for sample usage.
range
is the commits range as passed to the command line
Options
More advanced options are
p
orpath
Git project path, defaults to the current working pathb
orbranch
Git branch, defaults tomaster
t
ortitle
Regular expression to parse the commit title (see next chapter)m
ormeaning
Meaning of capturing block in title's regular expressionf
orfile
JSON Configuration file, better option when you don't want to pass all parameters to the command line, for an example see options.jsons
orscript
External script for post-processing commitsc
ormerge-commits
List only merge commits,git log
command is executed with the--merges
flag instead of--no-merges
Title Parsing
Some projects might have special naming conventions for the commit title.
The options t
and m
allow to specify this logic and extract additional information from the title.
For instance, Aria Templates has the following convention
fix #123 Title of a bug fix commit
feat #234 Title of a cool new feature
In this case using
git-release-notes -t "^([a-z]+) #(\d+) (.*)$" -m type -m issue -m title v1.3.6..HEAD html
generates the additional fields on the commit object
type
first capturing blockissue
second capturing blocktitle
third capturing block (redefines the title)
Another project using similar conventions is AngularJs, commit message conventions.
git-release-notes -t "^(\w*)(?:\(([\w\$\.]*)\))?\: (.*)$" -m type -m scope -m title v1.1.2..v1.1.3 markdown
Post Processing
The advanced options cover the most basic use cases, however sometimes you might need some additional processing, for instance to get commit metadata from external sources (Jira, GitHub, Waffle...)
Using -s script_file.js
you can invoke any arbitrary node script with the following signature:
module.exports = function(data, callback) {
/**
* Here `data` contains exactly the same values your template will normally receive. e.g.
*
* {
* commits: [], // the array of commits as described above
* range: '<since>..<until>',
* dateFnsFormat: function () {},
* debug: function() {}, // utility function to log debug messages
* }
*
* Do all the processing you need and when ready call the callback passing the new data structure
*/
callback({
commits: data.commits.map(doSomething),
extra: { additional: 'data' },
});
//
};
The object passed to the callback will be merged with the input data and passed back to the template.
For an example check samples/post-processing.js
Debug
If your post processing script or template throws an exception, the JSON data will be written to the file system in the same folder as the processing script.
The DEBUG environment variable can also be useful for fault diagnosis:
Linux
DEBUG=release-notes:*
git-release-notes ...
Windows
SET DEBUG=release-notes:cli,release-notes:externalscript
git-release-notes ...
Note the filtering options available: release-notes:cli
, release-notes:externalscript
, release-notes:data