The purpose of the autonewsmd R package is to bring the power of conventional commit messages to the R community. There is no need anymore to tediously maintain a changelog file manually. If you are using conventional commit messages, autonewsmd will do that for you and automatically generate a human readable changelog file directly from the repository's git history.
Conventional commit messages (https://www.conventionalcommits.org/en/v1.0.0/) come with some easy rules to create human readable commit messages for a git history. One advantage is that following these conventions, these messages are also machine readable and automated tools can run on top of them in order to, e.g., generate beautiful changelogs out of them. Similar tools written in other programming languages are, for example, auto-changelog for JavaScript and auto-changelog for Python.
You can install autonewsmd with:
install.packages("autonewsmd")
You can install the development version of autonewsmd with:
install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("kapsner/autonewsmd")
The default changelog template organizes commits according to their association with specific tags. The tags form the headings of the changelog file and are sorted in decreasing order according to their release dates. The following table lists the commit types that are currently supported by autonewsmd. To be correctly recognized by autonewsmd, it is important that the formatting of the commit messages follow the conventions described here.
| Type | Changelog Subheading |
|---|---|
| feat: | New features |
| fix: | Bug fixes |
| refactor: | Refactorings |
| perf: | Performance |
| build: | Build |
| test: | Tests |
| ci: | CI |
| docs: | Docs |
| style: | Style |
| chore: | Other changes |
If any commit type includes BREAKING CHANGE in its commit message's body or footer, the subheading Breaking changes is included as first subheading within the respective sections. Furthermore, the detection of breaking changes using the exclamation mark (!) between the type description and the colon (as described here) is supported as well.
First of all, create a small repository with some commit messages.
library(autonewsmd)
# (Example is based on the public examples from the `git2r` R package)
## Initialize a repository
path <- file.path(tempdir(), "autonewsmd")
dir.create(path)
repo <- git2r::init(path)
## Config user
git2r::config(repo, user.name = "Alice", user.email = "alice@example.org")
git2r::remote_set_url(repo, "foobar", "https://example.org/git2r/foobar")
## Write to a file and commit
lines <- "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do"
writeLines(lines, file.path(path, "example.txt"))
git2r::add(repo, "example.txt")
git2r::commit(repo, "feat: new file example.txt")
## Write again to a file and commit
Sys.sleep(2) # wait two seconds, otherwise, commit messages have same time stamp
lines2 <- paste0(
"eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. ",
"Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris ",
"nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat."
)
write(lines2, file.path(path, "example.txt"), append = TRUE)
git2r::add(repo, "example.txt")
git2r::commit(repo, "refactor: added second phrase")
## Also add a tag here
git2r::tag(repo, "v0.0.1")
Then, instantiate an autonewsmd object. Here, you must provide the repo_name (this argument is used to compose the title of the changelog file). The repo_path-argument can be provided optionally and defaults to the current working directory ("."). The repo_path should be the root of a git repository. The $generate()-method creates a list with all commit messages that is used for rendering the changelog file.
an <- autonewsmd$new(repo_name = "TestRepo", repo_path = path)
an$generate()
Executing the $write()-method, the changelog is written to the path specified with the repo_path-argument. If force = FALSE (the default), a dialog is prompted to ask the user if the file should be (over-) written.
an$write(force = TRUE)
Now, we can verify that the file NEWS.md also appears in the git folder and check its content.
list.files(path)
#> [1] "example.txt" "NEWS.md"
newsmd <- readLines(file.path(path, "NEWS.md"))
newsmd
#> [1] "# TestRepo NEWS"
#> [2] ""
#> [3] "## v0.0.1 (2022-08-27)"
#> [4] ""
#> [5] "#### New features"
#> [6] ""
#> [7] "- new file"
#> [8] " ([22b8453](https://example.org/git2r/foobar/tree/22b845346a0f3686d79eb86445af6be71dc86da6))"
#> [9] ""
#> [10] "#### Refactorings"
#> [11] ""
#> [12] "- added second phrase"
#> [13] " ([ec510eb](https://example.org/git2r/foobar/tree/ec510ebb465d25ab7ad27e8b637cf4113b55cbdf))"
#> [14] ""
#> [15] "Full set of changes:"
#> [16] "[`22b8453...v0.0.1`](https://example.org/git2r/foobar/compare/22b8453...v0.0.1)"
autonewsmd, sjtable2df, rBiasCorrection, BiasCorrector, DIZtools, DIZutils, DQAstats, DQAgui, miRacumDQA, kdry, mlexperiments, mllrnrs, mlsurvlrnrs authors-block
(If you are using autonewsmd and you like to have your repository listed here, please add the link pointing to the changelog file to this README.md and create a pull request.)
newsmd: manually add updates (version or bullet points) to the NEWS.md filefledge: to streamline the process of updating changelogs (NEWS.md) and versioning R packages developed in git repositories (also supporting conventional commits)
- add options to format the changelog
- add more changelog style templates
- add support for Commit message with scope
- switch rendering of md to quarto -> challenges: currently, quarto does not allow to pass objects from the environment to the document that is rendered; hence, one needs to find a solution how to pass the
repo_list, which is created in theget_git_logfunction (as well as some other objects) on to the *.qmd file for properly rendering the document.