changelog
A tool for updating project changelogs and package.json files for new releases.
Why?
Having a changelog (or history) file in a project helps you communicate to your users (developers) which changes you find most important to a release. Obviously the commit history is always available, but is often filled with noise. The changelog is a noise free place to highlight these major changes in a more summarized and human readable form.
Currently workflows do not put enough emphasis on the changelog. Developers will often make a series of commits and then just bump the version in package.json. By centering the versioning workflow around the changelog, I hope to encourage more modules to keep an updated history.
Workflow
install the changelog tool
npm install -g defunctzombie/changelog
create an empty initial changelog
changelog --init
A HISTORY.md file will be created with the following content
# UNRELEASED
* initial
release a new version
After you make some commits and add entries to the changelog, you can release a new version using the --release flag
changelog --release 1.0.0
This will perform the following:
- Update the first changelog
UNRELEASEDline to# 1.0.0 (YYYY-MM-DD). - Set the version in
package.json git commit v<new version>git tag v<new version>
bump to UNRELEASED
This will add a new UNRELEASED line to the start of the changelog.
changelog --increment
changelog format
# UNRELEASED
* summary item
* summary item
# 1.0.0 (YYYY-MM-DD)
* summary item
# 0.1.0 (YYYY-MM-DD)
* summary item
* initial
The reason UNRELEASED is used at the top of the changelog is to indicate a series of changes which have not yet been officially tagged. It may be that a particular change will case a minor or major version bump and so the version cannot be known until a release is ready.