Good ways to manage a changelog using git

Question

I ve been using Git for a while now  and I recently started using it to tag my releases so that I could more easily keep track of changes and be able to see which version each of our clients is running  unfortunately the code currently mandates that each client have their own copy of the PHP site  I m changing this  but it s slow-going   In any case  we re starting to build some momentum  I thought it would be really good to be able to show people what has changed since the last release  Problem is  I haven t been maintaining a changelog because I don t have a good idea of how to go about it  For this particular time  I can run through the log and manually create one  but that will get tiring very quickly  I tried googling  quot git changelog quot  and  quot git manage changelog quot  but I didn t find anything that really talked about the workflow of code changes and how that coincides with the changelog  We re currently following Rein Henrichs  development workflow and I would love something that went along with that  Is there a standard approach that I am missing  or is this an area where everybody does their own thing

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A more to-the-point CHANGELOG  git log --since 1 11 2011 --until 28 11 2011 --no-merges --format  B

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Based on bithavoc  it lists the last tag until HEAD  But I hope to list the logs between 2 tags      2 or 3 dots between  YOUR LAST VERSION TAG  and  HEAD  git log YOUR LAST VERSION TAG  HEAD --no-merges --format  B   List logs between 2 tags      2 or 3 dots between 2 tags git log FROM TAG   TO TAG   For example  it will list logs from v1 0 0 to v1 0 1   git log v1 0 0   v1 0 1 --oneline --decorate

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Since creating a tag per version is the best practice  you may want to partition your changelog per version  In that case  this command could help you   git log YOUR LAST VERSION TAG  HEAD --no-merges --format  B

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The gitlog-to-changelog script comes in handy to generate a GNU-style ChangeLog   As shown by gitlog-to-changelog --help  you may select the commits used to generate a ChangeLog file using either the option --since   gitlog-to-changelog --since 2008-01-01  gt  ChangeLog   or by passing additional arguments after --  which will be passed to git-log  called internally by gitlog-to-changelog    gitlog-to-changelog -- -n 5 foo  gt  last-5-commits-to-branch-foo   For instance  I am using the following rule in the top-level Makefile am of one of my projects    PHONY  update-ChangeLog update-ChangeLog      if test -d   srcdir   git  then                                    srcdir  build-aux gitlog-to-changelog                          --format   s n n b n  --no-cluster                            --strip-tab --strip-cherry-pick                               --    cat   srcdir   last-cl-gen                             gt ChangeLog tmp                                               amp  amp  git rev-list -n 1 HEAD  gt  last-cl-gen tmp                    amp  amp   echo  cat   srcdir  ChangeLog   gt  gt ChangeLog tmp             amp  amp  mv -f ChangeLog tmp   srcdir  ChangeLog                     amp  amp  mv -f  last-cl-gen tmp   srcdir   last-cl-gen               amp  amp  rm -f ChangeLog tmp                                      fi  EXTRA DIST     last-cl-gen   This rule is used at release time to update ChangeLog with the latest not-yet-recorded commit messages   The file  last-cl-gen contains the SHA1 identifier of the latest commit recorded in ChangeLog and is stored in the Git repository   ChangeLog is also recorded in the repository  so that it can be edited  e g  to correct typos  without altering the commit messages

User · Answer

git log --oneline --no-merges  git describe --abbrev 0 --tags   HEAD   cut -c 9-   sort   Is what I like to use  It gets all commits since the last tag  cut gets rid of the commit hash  If you use ticket numbers at the beginning of your commit messages  they are grouped with sort  Sorting also helps if you prefix certain commits with fix  typo  etc

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I let the CI server pipe the following into a file named CHANGELOG for a each new release with the date set in the release-filename    gt git log --graph --all --date relative --pretty format   x09  ad  d  s   aN

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You can use some flavor of git log to help you out   git log --pretty  s                   only print the subject   If you name your branches nicely  so that a merge to master shows up as something like  Merged branch feature-foobar   you can shorten things by only showing that message  and not all the little commits that you merged  which together form the feature   git log --pretty  s --first-parent    only follow first parent of merges   You might be able to augment this with a script of your own  which could do things like strip out the  Merged branch  bits  normalize formatting  etc  At some point you have to write it yourself though  of course   Then you could create a new section for the changelog once per version   git log  opts  vX X X  vX X Y   helper-script  gt  changelogs X X Y   and commit that in your version release commit   If your problem is that those commit subjects aren t anything like what you d want to put in a changelog  you pretty much have two options  keep doing everything manually  and try to keep up with it more regularly instead of playing catch-up at release time   or fix up your commit message style  One option  if the subjects aren t going to do it for you  would be to place lines like  change  added feature foobar  in the bodies of your commit messages  so that later you could do something like git log --pretty  B   grep  change  to grab only those super-important bits of the messages   I m not entirely sure how much more than that git could really help you create your changelogs  Maybe I ve misinterpreted what you mean by  manage

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This was about 3-4 years ago  but for the sake of future searchers  it s now possible to generate gorgeous logs with   git log --oneline --decorate   Or  if you want it even prettier  with color for terminal    git log --oneline --decorate --color   Piping that output to ChangeLog is what I currently use in all my projects  it s simply amazing

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DISCLAIMER  I m the author of gitchangelog of which I ll be speaking in the following    TL DR  You might want to check gitchangelog s own changelog or the ascii output that generated the previous   If you want to generate a changelog from your git history  you ll probably have to consider    the output format   Pure custom ASCII  Debian changelog type  Markdow  ReST     some commit filtering  you probably don t want to see all the typo s or cosmetic changes getting in your changelog  some commit text wrangling before being included in the changelog   Ensuring normalization of messages as having a first letter uppercase or a final dot  but it could be removing some special markup in the summary also  is your git history compatible    Merging  tagging  is not always so easily supported by most of the tools  It depends on how you manage your history    Optionaly you might want some categorization  new things  changes  bugfixes      With all this in mind  I created and use gitchangelog  It s meant to leverage a git commit message convention to achieve all of the previous goals   Having a commit message convention is mandatory to create a nice changelog  with or without using gitchangelog    commit message convention  The following are suggestions to what might be useful to think about adding in your commit messages   You might want to separate roughly your commits into big sections    by intent  for example  new  fix  change      by object  for example  doc  packaging  code      by audience  for example  dev  tester  users        Additionally  you could want to tag some commits     as  minor  commits that shouldn t get outputed to your changelog  cosmetic changes  small typo in comments     as  refactor  if you don t really have any significative feature changes  Thus this should not also be part of the changelog displayed to final user for instance  but might be of some interest if you have a developer changelog  you could tag also with  api  to mark API changes or new API stuff       etc      Try to write your commit message by targeting users  functionality  as often as you can   example  This is standard git log --oneline to show how these information could be stored      5a39f73 fix  encoding issues with non-ascii chars    a60d77a new  pkg  added    travis yml   for automated tests     57129ba new  much greater performance on big repository by issuing only one shell command for all the commits   fixes  7    6b4b267 chg  dev  refactored out the formatting characters from GIT    197b069 new  dev  reverse   natural   order to get reverse chronological order by default   refactor    6b891bc new  add utf-8 encoding declaration  minor    So if you ve noticed  the format I chose is    new chg fix     dev pkg    COMMIT MESSAGE    minor refactor          To see an actual output result  you could look at the end of the PyPI page of gitchangelog  To see a full documentation of my commit message convention you can see the reference file gitchangelog rc reference  How to generate exquisite changelog from this   Then  it s quite easy to make a complete changelog  You could make your own script quite quickly  or use gitchangelog   gitchangelog will generate a full changelog  with sectioning support as New  Fix      and is reasonably configurable to your own committing conventions  It supports any type of output thanks to templating through Mustache  Mako templating  and has a default legacy engine written in raw python   all current 3 engines have examples of how to use them and can output changelog s as the one displayed on the PyPI page of gitchangelog   I m sure you know that there are plenty of other git log to changelog tools out there also

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For a GNU style changelog  I ve cooked the function  gnuc             printf    date    Y- m- d    John Doe   lt john doe gmail com gt  n n      git diff-tree --no-commit-id --name-only -r HEAD   sed  s    t           tee  dev tty   xsel -b     With this    I commit my changes periodically to backup and rebase them before doing the final edit to the ChangeLog then run  gnuc   and now my clipboard contains something like   2015-07-24  John Doe   lt john doe gmail com gt             gdb python py-linetable c                 gdb python py-symtab c         Then I use the clipboard as a starting point to update the ChangeLog   It is not perfect  e g  files should be relative to their ChangeLog path  so python py-symtab c without gdb  since I will edit the gdb ChangeLog   but is a good starting point   More advanced scripts    https   github com tromey git-gnu-changelog by Tromey  a GDB maintainer GCC s contrib mklog  https   github com davidmalcolm gcc-refactoring-scripts blob 1fc7fe038bffbb2b48d0a7a300625639f01aefa1 generate-changelog py   I have to agree with Tromey though  duplicating git commit data in the ChangeLog is useless   If you are going to make a changelog  make it a good summary of what is going on  possibly as specified at http   keepachangelog com

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I also made a library for this  It is fully configurable with a Mustache template  That can    Be stored to file  like CHANGELOG md  Be posted to MediaWiki Or just be printed to STDOUT   I also made    A Gradle plugin A Maven plugin A Jenkins plugin A Bitbucket Server plugin A command line tool   More details on Github  https   github com tomasbjerre git-changelog-lib  From command line   npx git-changelog-command-line -std -tec     Changelog  Changelog for   ownerName     repoName        tags        name       issues        hasIssue         hasLink         name      issue      link      title      hasIssueType      issueType       hasIssueType      hasLabels      labels              labels      hasLabels         hasLink         hasLink         name     issue     title      hasIssueType      issueType       hasIssueType      hasLabels      labels              labels      hasLabels         hasLink        hasIssue        hasIssue         name        hasIssue         commits        messageTitle          messageBodyItems                messageBodyItems       hash    https   github com   ownerName     repoName   commit   hash      authorName      commitTime          commits        issues      tags       Or in Jenkins

[git] Good ways to manage a changelog using git?

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