Changelog Manager

A small command line utility to manage changelogs and automate generating CHANGELOG.md

Overview

The compiled Changelog Manager executable can just be dropped into any development project, like a [project root]/bin or [project root]/tools directory. It can be used to generate json files representing a change log entry and used to combine all the files into your project's CHANGELOG.md as well as generate a standalone [build]-CHANGELOG.md in the project root directory.

note: Changelog Manger currently uses git rev-parse --show-toplevel to set [project root]

Usage

Changelog Manager has four commands:

• version - gets the current changelogmanager version
• help - displays the terminal help for changelogmanager
• add - generates changelog entry .json files
• combine - combines the existing changelog entry files and outputs two files

note: all commands support -h or --help thanks to Cobra

add

add is used to output generated .json files to [project root]/changelogs/unreleased/. This command has four flags that can be set when running executing it.

• Required flags:
  • --description [string] or -d [string] - the main message that will be displayed in the changelog for the corresponding code changes.
  • --author [string] or -a [string] - name of the developer responsible for the changes
• Optional flags:
  • --merge [id] or -m [id] - sets the merge or pull request id associated with the changes
  • --platform [string] or -p [string] - logs the platform the changes were applied to

Example Usage

changelogmanager add -d "This is my change description" -a "John Smith" -m 123

combine

combine takes all the .json file in [project root]/changelogs/unreleased/, combines them into a chunk of markdown, then appends the resulting markdown to the top of your [project root]/CHANGELOG.md as well as generating a [project root]/[build]-CHANGELOG.md stand alone file. By default it will delete the .json files after updating CHANGELOG.md. Combine only has one required flag:

• Required flags:
  • --build [string] or -b [string] - sets the build/version number all the changes are going to be applied to.
• Optional flags:
  • --note [string] or -n [string] - sets a note for the build
  • --keep or -k - retains the .json files after the combine is complete

Example Usage

changelogmanager combine -b "v0.1" -note "first build hosted on gitlab" -k