Generate Changelogs

I came across the idea to generate Changelogs for my projects.

But it must match the following rules:

• Don’t Repeat Yourself: generate Changelogs automatically, not manually. Because generating Changelogs manually is too much effort.
• Use Git commit messages, but not all of them. Use only selected messages.

So I coded a simple Bash script that filters all Git commit messages containing #RN. Which stands for ReleaseNote. For example:

Feature XYZ added. #RN

The script uses Git Tags to grep all commits between the second to last to the last tag.

You get a file (for example CHANGELOG-v1.1.0.txt) something like this:

2015-06-19 13:38:59 CEST

Version 1.1.0

Changes since v1.0.0
- Feature XYZ added.
- Tests added.

Don’t forget to add CHANGELOG-*.txt to your projects .gitignore file.