Intro#
In this article I will go through integrating git cliff to automated a change log generation report
What is git-cliff#
git-cliff can generate changelog files from the Git history by utilizing conventional commits as well as regex-powered custom parsers.
Setup#
Install with cargo
cargo install git-cliff
Initialize with the following command
git cliff --init
It will create a cliff.toml file with the configurations that should be used.
Let’s generate a changelog
git cliff -o CHANGELOG.md
Customization#
The tool allows several customizations that you can configure on the toml file, like skipping commits, multirepos, emojies.
Check the example section for more details
Integrations#
Now what you would like to do is integrate this application on your CI/CD process and not having your developers to worry on generating the CHANGELOG file the following section provide several examples based on your source control system
Providing one example with Github Actions
- name: Check out repository
uses: actions/checkout@v3
with:
fetch-depth: 0
- name: Generate a changelog
uses: orhun/git-cliff-action@v3
with:
config: cliff.toml
args: --verbose
env:
OUTPUT: CHANGELOG.md
GITHUB_REPO: ${{ github.repository }}
Conclusion#
Git-cliff is highly customizable and has a low footprint, making it an excellent choice for incorporating into a CI/CD process to automatically generate a CHANGELOG for a source control repository. To ensure consistency in how developers record changes and apply tags, I recommend defining clear guidelines for pre-commit hooks. This will streamline the automation process. Additionally, thoroughly test various configurations before finalizing your toml configuration.