@AlekSi There is a REST API to generate the release note content (markdown) without actually creating a release in GitHub. Since we already expect the developer to configure GITHUB_TOKEN in their dev env, I think we can curl this API and get the notes.

I think I would still prefer some other existing tool with customization

Hey, if this is still a pending issue, I would love to try it out!

@AlekSi I found this tool called git-chglog, which is written in Golang. We have an option of either running it as a Docker container, or using it as a direct dependency.

Once a template and workflow is defined, running this is simply:

git-chglog -o CHANGELOG.md

By integrating this into the Taskfile.yml, we can generate the Changelog appropriately for the latest version. Would this be a sufficient solution?

One good feature of the current tool is that it uses PR titles, not commits. The new tool should have that feature too.

It does not look like git-chglog uses PRs.

It does use PR Titles out of the box, and is currently what they use themselves when generating their changelog between versions:

It's also possible to maintain the same style as the current Changelog.

It does use PR Titles out of the box

I think they use merge commit subject lines, not PR titles. The difference is that PR's title and labels can be edited after that PR is merged. We often do that to produce better changelog entries.

@AlekSi Understood what you meant by that.

Can I clarify that in essence we need some tool that does the following:

1. Get the list of PRs merged since last version. This can be done using a simple API call, as mentioned by @wazir-ahmed
2. Get the list of labels from PRs
3. Group PRs by labels that we want to use in the PR, which would be provided in some sort of config file
4. Render new version (as provided by some template) and merge existing CHANGELOG with new version CHANGELOG

Unfortunately, there are not many out of the box solutions sufficiently allow this type of workflow, since the idea of Pull Requests are mainly relevant to only GitHub. However, majority of the solutions focus on commits specifically since it is an intrinsic part of Git itself, shared across Git-based version control platforms.

I tried the workflow above for steps 1 and 2 which are fairly easy. The latest tag and date of tag can be obtained with a git command, which can be executed using Google's GitHub wrapper or with the go-git. Subsequently, using a variant of the cURL command

curl -H "Accept: application/vnd.github+json" \
"https://api.github.com/search/issues?q=repo:FerretDB/FerretDB+is:pr+is:merged+merged:>=2023-08-28"

we can get all PRs. The great thing is the PR response from the Git endpoint has both the title of the PR and the label.

Subsequently, some data processing can be done to filter and group the PRs by some input labels, and finally render the new version and merge the existing CHANGELOG based on the template.

Of course, this isn't very trivial to do, but I believe that this could yield good results.

Merging with existing CHANGELOG (and some minor tweaks) could be done manually. The new version's changelog could be rendered to the stdout.

We would much prefer not to maintain one more tool ourselves. We might make our own, but only if no one exists already.

Got it. That would be doable as well!