Skip to content

changelog

Turn commit history into a changelog — and read one back into a typed model. changelog walks a repository's Conventional Commits to generate a categorised changelog, and parses an existing release-notes document into Changelog → Release → Entry you can query.

go get gitlab.com/phpboyscout/go/changelog

// Generate from the repo's tags and commits.
md, err := changelog.GenerateFromRepo(".", changelog.WithSinceTag("v1.2.0"))

// Parse existing notes and inspect them.
cl := changelog.Parse(rawNotes)
if cl.HasBreakingChanges() {
    // ...
}

Two halves

  • Generate from git history — GenerateFromRepo opens the repo with go-git, reads tags and commits, classifies each Conventional Commit, and renders newest-first markdown. Bound it with WithSinceTag, WithMaxReleases, or take everything with WithIncludeAll.
  • Parse existing release notes — Parse and ParseFromArchive turn a markdown changelog (or a gzip/tar release archive) back into a typed Changelog, with HasBreakingChanges, BreakingChanges, and EntriesByCategory to query it and FormatSummary to render a short summary.

How commits become entries

Each commit is classified into a Category — breaking, feature, fix, performance, or other — with its scope and description pulled out. Releases are ordered by semver, newest first. The rules (and why test/ci are dropped, how breaking changes are detected) are in Conventional Commits & categorisation.

No framework weight

The whole dependency graph is go-git, the leodido conventional-commits parser, x/mod, and cockroachdb/errors — enforced by a depfootprint test. Start with Getting started; the full API is on pkg.go.dev.