Description

When a new release of a software project is announced, it is convenient to generate documents that let the project users know what were the changes and other relevant notes about the new project release.

This package can help to automatically generate changelog and release note files, so the developers of the project reduce the work that is necessary to finalize and check the new release of the project.

This package can generate a changelog from a project's committing history messages and metadata using composer and automate versioning with semver and conventional-commits.

It provides a command that can be run from the terminal, or using composer scripts, to generate a changelog file in markdown for the current project.

The command may take parameters that define the releases of the project that will be considered to extract the changes from the git history to generate the file. The package uses a configuration system with that permit to customize the settings you may want to have your desired changelog generated.

Look at our CHANGELOG file if you are looking for an example of a possible final result.

How to contribute

Have an idea? Found a bug? Please raise to ISSUES or PULL REQUEST. Contributions are welcome and are greatly appreciated! Every little bit helps.

📘 Requirements

• php >= 7.1.3
• git >= 2.1.4

📖 Installation

You can install it easily with composer

composer require --dev marcocesarato/php-conventional-changelog

Scripts (Optional)

For easy use the changelog generator or release faster your new version you can add to your composer.json the scripts:

Notes: you can customize it according to your needs

Now you can just run composer changelog or composer release (the last one will autobump the version code and commit changes) to generate your changelog.

📘 Configuration

Notes: this procedure is optional and permit to overwriting/merging the default settings

For customize settings you just needs to create a file named .changelog on the root of your project/on the working dir or use the --config option to specify the location of your configuration file.

Notes:

• When a setting on the configuration file is not necessary just omit it
• The default ignored types are: build, chore, ci, docs, perf, refactor, revert, style, test
• To allow all types just keep empty types and set empty ignoreTypes

You can have more info about reading the config documentation.

💻 Usage

The changelog generator will generate a log of changes from the date of the last tag to the current date, and it will put all commit logs in the latest version just created.

Notes:

• Some of these options listed on examples could be used together at the same time (ex. --first-release --commit)
• Auto bump of version code using the Semantic Versioning (MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH) is enabled by default if not specified the release method.
  • MAJOR: At least one breaking change.
  • MINOR: At least one new feature.
  • PATCH: Default
• Use these options to specify the release method: --major, --minor, --patch, --rc, --beta, --alpha.

Examples

First version

Notes: use this option only if you don't need all history changes or is the first version, else run with --history option

To generate your changelog for the first version run:

New version

To generate your changelog (without committing files)

New release (with commit and tag)

To generate your changelog with auto commit and auto versioning tagging run:

or to amend at an existing commit you can run:

History

To generate your changelog with the entire history of changes of all releases

Warn: this operation will overwrite the CHANGELOG.md file if it already exists

Date range

To generate your changelog from a specified date to another specified date

Tag range

To generate your changelog from a specified tag to another specified tag

Specific version

To generate your changelog with a specific version code

Commands List

Info: You can have more info about running php vendor/bin/conventional-changelog --help