changelog-generator

Changelog Generator

Parse a project's git history and produce a high-quality CHANGELOG.md following the Keep a Changelog convention.

Philosophy

A changelog is for humans, not machines. It answers: "What meaningful changes happened between version X and version Y?" Raw commit logs fail at this because they contain noise — typo fixes, merge commits, CI tweaks, and refactors that don't affect users. This skill filters signal from noise and writes entries that a user or contributor can actually understand.

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Workflow

Phase 1 — Repository Analysis

Before generating anything, understand the project's commit and versioning patterns.

# 1. Check if we're in a git repo
git rev-parse --is-inside-work-tree 2>/dev/null

# 2. Get all tags (versions) sorted by date
git tag --sort=-creatordate | head -30

# 3. Detect versioning scheme
# SemVer: v1.2.3 or 1.2.3
# CalVer: 2025.01, 2025-01-15
# Other: named releases, build numbers
git tag --sort=-creatordate | head -10

# 4. Detect commit convention
# Sample recent commits to identify the pattern
git log --oneline -30

# 5. Check for existing changelog
cat CHANGELOG.md 2>/dev/null
cat HISTORY.md 2>/dev/null
cat CHANGES.md 2>/dev/null

# 6. Check for existing config that hints at convention
cat .commitlintrc* commitlint.config.* 2>/dev/null  # Commitlint
cat .czrc .cz.toml 2>/dev/null                       # Commitizen
cat cliff.toml 2>/dev/null                            # git-cliff
cat .versionrc* 2>/dev/null                           # standard-version

# 7. Get remote URL for PR/issue links
git remote get-url origin 2>/dev/null

# 8. Package manifest for current version
cat package.json 2>/dev/null | grep '"version"'
cat pyproject.toml 2>/dev/null | grep 'version'
cat Cargo.toml 2>/dev/null | grep '^version'

Extract from the analysis:

Fact	How to determine
Commit convention	Pattern match on recent commits (see detection rules below)
Versioning scheme	Tag format analysis
Latest version/tag	Most recent tag
Remote URL	git remote get-url origin — needed for PR/issue links
Existing changelog	Check for CHANGELOG.md or variants
Unreleased commits	Commits since the latest tag