Git-Cliff

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

https://git-cliff.org/docs/category/integration

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.