chalogen

CHANGELOG.md generator CLI and Github Action

Keeping CAHNGELOG.md file in your repository is very important to inform users what happened in your code from version to version. Doing it manually is hard work, but using Chalogen you will get pretty changelog based on your commits.

• Parse conventional commits
• Supports version commits like from npm version command.
• Available as CLI tool or GitHub Action
• Supports tags named in semver format
• Supports Git emojis

Conventional commits

Chalogen will parse all your commits, but better result will be with conventional commits. If work with VSCode, there is nice extension to help you making such commits. If commits doesn't matched as conventional, it is just goes to other type group.

CLI

Install globaly with:

npm i -g chalogen

Then run in your local repositroy folder:

chalogen

And you will see new CHANGELOG.md file with versions history.

It is important to have full commits history in your local repository.

Look for additional parameters with chalogen --help command.

GitHub Action

It is good idea to run Chalogen in GitHub Action to have always actual changelog file in your repository. Just add and commit file .github/workflows/generate_changelog.yml in your GitHub repository:

If you installed CLI you can just run chalogen action to put exactly same file in your current repo.

name: Generate Changelog

on:
  push:
    branches: [ main, master]

jobs:
  changelog:
    name: Update Changelog
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout code
        uses: actions/checkout@v2
        with:
          fetch-depth: 0
      - name: Update Changelog
        uses: AlexxNB/chalogen@master
        with:
          title: My project changelog 
      - name: Commit Changelog to repository
        uses: stefanzweifel/[email protected]
        with:
          commit_message: 'docs(Changelog): Update Changelog'
          file_pattern: CHANGELOG.md

Input parameters

• title – Title of changelog. Default: Changelog
• list – Conventional types list to include in changelog. Default: feat,fix,perf,docs,other
• date – Date format; use only %Y,%M and %D placeholders. Default: %Y-%M-%D
• file – Filename of the changelog file. Default: CHANGELOG.md
• version – Show only specified version. Default: false
• unreleased – Show only unreleased commits. Default: false
• hide-unreleased – Hide unreleased section. Default: false
• hide-title – Hide title of changelog. Default: false
• hide-body – Hide body of commit's messages. Default: false

Output parameters

• changelog – changelog history in markdown format, which may be used in next workflow steps(ex. as release body).