AntonioGally/ag-changelogger

GitHub Changelog Updater Action

This action automatically updates the CHANGELOG.md file in your repository whenever a new pull request is merged. It uses the your Pull Request as data and append it to the changelog. The data that the action gets in yout repository is: title, body, commits, baseBranch, prUrl, createdAt, prNumber.

Inputs

Name	Type	Description	Required
commitEmail	string	The email used for committing the updated CHANGELOG.md.	true
commitUserName	string	The username used for committing the updated CHANGELOG.md.	true
changelogPath	string	Relative path to your changelog file, starting from the root of your project. Default is "./CHANGELOG.md"	false
githubToken	string	GH token that will provide the permissions to read and write in your repository	true

Usage

Include this action in your workflow file. Here is an example:

on:
  pull_request:
    types: [closed] #only closed pr
    branches:
      - main #trigger this action if the pr is related with this branch

jobs:
  update_changelog:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    if: github.event.pull_request.merged == true
    steps:
      - name: Checkout code
        uses: actions/checkout@v3
        with:
          ref: main

      - name: Update Changelog
        uses: AntonioGally/ag-changelogger/@main
        with:
          commitEmail: antonio.gally@gmail.com
          commitUserName: AntonioGally
          changelogPath: ./CHANGELOG.md #Relative path
          githubToken: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }} #Github default token, PATs are recomended

Observations

🚨 Your repository must have another script/action that creates the tags. This action doesn't create any tags it self, just read the last created tag and increase one version for loggin the changes, expecting that other script will create the new tag using the same versioning logic (with major, minor and patch regex). The function that do that can be finded in ./utils/getLatestTag and is called getVersionByPrTitle.
The changelog file must exist in the repository's main branch.
If the pr's title doesn't contains major, minor or patch name, the script will increase the patch number of the version.

Example

Contributing

Just send a nice PR that I'll review it with love :D Or just email me as well I'll read

Under the hood

I'm using ncc build to generate... a build, with all the node_modules that the script need to be executed. I need to do this because I wanted to minimize the effort to run this actions in other repositories. I could make a sh executable file and install the dependencies and stuff, but I wont :D. The script is simple, the changeLogger.js is the entrancy to my dirty code files. It will start getting all the inputs that you pass by workflow and will create a authenticated connection with github api. Then, will first get the pr information, including the commits that are part of the PR. After that, the script will get the next tag version, starting from the last tag that you have in your repo. If you don't have any, the first tag will be v0.1.0. After get the next version, the script will gatter all the informations into one big string and will try to find your changelog file. After finding the file, the script concats the new big string with the old string in your changelog. With this big and updated string, the script will commit the changes using execSync function from child_process and done, you have a nice changelog now!

Best practices

Try to fill the description as much as you can, put images and texts that describe directly what was your change in that PR. In a long run, will help a lot in the changelog file, and will be much nicier to see :D

AntonioGally / ag-changelogger