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Changelog Create CLI Tool

This extension helps developers make easy notes on changes made to their codebase.

🌱 Introduction

This is the CLI alternative to a Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code extensions developed for the convenience of creating special change files that are used to manage a changelog.

What are the change files? 🤔

Change files are just files located in the changes directory with the following naming scheme:

<change_type> [<change_category>] <change_description>

Acceptable entries for the <change_type> are:

  • Added
  • Changed
  • Deprecated
  • Removed
  • Fixed
  • Security

This decision was inspired by following the principles for keeping a good changelog.

To avoid incorrect file naming and to ease file creation process on the developer, this CLI tool was made for general usage alongside our other helpers:

These files are then used with our Changelog Manager tool to compile changes and insert a new changelog sections and thus versioning the application.

For the convenience of using this tool to manage a changelog in an automated CI/CD environment we made a GitHub Action and an Azure DevOps extension.

We highly recommend that you read up on how and what exactly is it doing behind the scenes, as well as, learn how to use the .changelog.json configuration file to customize the tool's behaviour.

📖 Table of contents

📝 Usage

Firstly, you can use our GitHub Releases tab to start using this CLI. Link contains pre-built binaries for Windows and Linux.

You can run the binary anywhere in the target project's workspace directory.

If the helper is used in the directory that doesn't contain changes directory to create the change file in, it will automatically search current working directory tree upwards for the nearest changes directory.

The helper takes two arguments and one optional input:

  • change type - required
  • change description - required
  • change category - optional (prefixed with either -c or --category)

Example of a call:

cc [options] <change_type> <change_description>

Arguments:

  • change_type:
    • Change type following the 'Keep a Changelog' guiding principles.
    • Acceptable entries for the <change_type> are:
      • Added
      • Changed
      • Deprecated
      • Removed
      • Fixed
      • Security
      • each of the previous entries can also be specified using only their first letters
    • Acceptable entries are case-insensitive.
  • change_description:
    • Change description that describes the changes made (if the text is longer than a single word, it needs to be quoted).
    • Excess whitespace will be removed.

Options:

  • -v | --version:
    • Shows version information.
  • -c | --category <change_category>:
    • One of the valid change categories (case-insensitive) defined in the configuration file if it exists.
    • Arbitrary if the configuration does not exist or is empty.
      • Can be empty.
      • Excess whitespace will be removed.
    • Needs to be quoted if its longer than a single word.
  • -? | -h | --help:
    • Shows help information.

Changes in the changes directory are just files with the following naming scheme:

<change_type> [<change_category>] <change_description>

[<change_category>] part of the naming is controlled and validated using the .changelog.json configuration file.

And that's it! You should now have a new file created inside the changes folder in your workspace directory! 🎉

You can now let this folder accumulate change entries which will be bundled up into your CHANGELOG.md when you want to create a new application release using our Changelog Manager tool or one of our CI/CD tasks mentioned in the introduction section.

⚙ Configuration file

.changelog.json is a JSON file that is optional. Configuration specifies which change categories are allowed in your project. File needs to be located in the same directory alongside the appropriate CHANGELOG.md file.

If we wanted to allow only 3 different change categories: API, FE (Frontend) and BE (Backend), the configuration would look like:

{
  "categories": [
    "API",
    "FE",
    "BE"
  ]
}

If the configuration exists, helper will deny the creation of change files which ignore every change in the changes directory that does not concur to it. On the other hand, if the configuration file does not exist, every change will be accepted and written to the CHANGELOG.md.

For more features that can be configured using the configuration file, see the Changelog Manager's README.

🏗 Development

Publishing

dotnet publish -c release -r win-x64 -p:PublishSingleFile=true
dotnet publish -c release -r linux-x64 -p:PublishSingleFile=true

☎ Support

If you are having problems, please let us know by raising a new issue.

🪪 License

This project is licensed with the MIT License.