LeastAuthority / towncrier

Building newsfiles for your project.

Hear ye, hear ye, says the towncrier

towncrier is a utility to produce useful, summarised news files for your project. Rather than reading the Git history as some newer tools to produce it, or having one single file which developers all write to, towncrier reads "news fragments" which contain information useful to end users.

Philosophy

towncrier delivers the news which is convenient to those that hear it, not those that write it.

That is, by duplicating what has changed from the "developer log" (which may contain complex information about the original issue, how it was fixed, who authored the fix, and who reviewed the fix) into a "news fragment" (a small file containing just enough information to be useful to end users), towncrier can produce a digest of the changes which is valuable to those who may wish to use the software. These fragments are also commonly called "topfiles" or "newsfiles" in Twisted parlance.

towncrier works best in a development system where all merges involve closing a ticket.

Quick Start

Install from PyPI:

python3 -m pip install towncrier

Note

towncrier, as a command line tool, works on Python 3.5+ only. It is usable by projects written in other languages, provided you give it the version of the project when invoking it. For Python 2/3 compatible projects, the version can be discovered automatically.

In your project root, add a pyproject.toml file, with the contents:

[tool.towncrier]
    package = "mypackage"
    package_dir = "src"
    filename = "NEWS.rst"

Then put news fragments (see "News Fragments" below) into a "newsfragments" directory under your package (so, if your project is named "myproject", and it's kept under src, your newsfragments dir would be src/myproject/newsfragments/).

To prevent git from removing the newsfragments directory, make a .gitignore file in it with:

!.gitignore

This will keep the folder around, but otherwise "empty".

towncrier needs to know what version your project is, and there are two ways you can give it:

• For Python 2/3 compatible projects, a __version__ in the top level package. This can be either a string literal, a tuple, or an Incremental version.
• Manually passing --version=<myversionhere> when interacting with towncrier.

To produce a draft of the news file, run:

towncrier --draft

To produce the news file for real, run:

towncrier

This command will remove the news files (with git rm) and append the built news to the filename specified in towncrier.ini, and then stage the news file changes (with git add). It leaves committing the changes up to the user.

If you wish to have content at the top of the news file (for example, to say where you can find the tickets), put your text above a rST comment that says:

.. towncrier release notes start

towncrier will then put the version notes after this comment, and leave your existing content that was above it where it is.

News Fragments

towncrier has a few standard types of news fragments, signified by the file extension. These are:

• .feature: Signifying a new feature.
• .bugfix: Signifying a bug fix.
• .doc: Signifying a documentation improvement.
• .removal: Signifying a deprecation or removal of public API.
• .misc: A ticket has been closed, but it is not of interest to users.

The start of the filename is the ticket number, and the content is what will end up in the news file. For example, if ticket #850 is about adding a new widget, the filename would be myproject/newsfragments/850.feature and the content would be myproject.widget has been added.