Changelogs

[airtonix 7]

@Eichi This is for you and any developers who are contributing.

Where I work, communicating with our stakeholders (both internal and external) is a key part of fostering strong confidence in our brand.

Part of that process is publishing changelogs, which at first I found really hard to do. Remembering all those changes, was incredibly hard for me when my mental context moves between the many projects we support every week. Looking at your recent release, I can see that you also have this problem.

Quote

We are very sorry, but we are not going to write a changelog this time. It would take us a week to write that!

 

I investigated a way to capture this intelligence during development using an npm package called `conventional-changelog`.

I suggest you use this tool to automate the creation of your changelog, yes it does mean your commit messages need to be more meaningful. you can pick a preset style from the many available.

One tip i'd suggest is this:

1. you (the project lead) lock down master and develop branches, so only you can commit or merge pull requests into them. 
   All contributors create feature branches, and submit merge requests into develop from there.
2. npm install conventional changelog as a local dependancy to the project. (keeping package.json at the root)
3. Create a precommit hook for develop that runs and commits the output from the `conventional-changelog-cli`.
4. when creating a release from master, publish the CHANGELOG.md/html/txt (omitting bits you don't think are relevant).

sources:

• http://keepachangelog.com/
• https://speakerdeck.com/stevemao/compose-a-changelog
• https://github.com/conventional-changelog/conventional-changelog-cli
• A bunch or presets here: https://www.npmjs.com/search?q=conventional-changelog

This is just a suggestion, one that I've found to save me hours of time, while also change the way I write commit messages... 

Edited July 1, 2016 by airtonix