How to automate release notes using GIT merge descriptions

Question

All,

In our organization we are trying to automate generating RELEASE NOTES using GIT Merge requests. Is there any better way to do this, preferably looking for a solution in NodeJS.

Answer 1

When using something like standard-version and commitizen for standardization of your commits you can make use of a GitLab CI-Pipeline that generates your release notes based on the changelog that is generated by standard-version

Within this Repository the project was set up using nodejs , react and typescript , but the configuration would be the same. This CI-Configuration is an example of the aforementioned pipeline configuration.

The same thing would also be applicable for Github actions with a little modification for Github-specific action syntax.

Without CI-Pipeline

The same thing would also be applicable for non-CI setups since the commands used in the ci-configuration are as well executable in local machines, but that way you would have some manual effort

Answer 2

Take a look at the semantic release plugin for GitLab: https://github.com/semantic-release/gitlab

Which implements the popular https://github.com/semantic-release/semantic-release project.