Simple Release Notes

A batteries-included and opinionated drop-in solution to generating and managing github release notes.

Overview

Two main workflows

reusable-update-release-candidate-notes.yml

Inputs

Input	Required	Type	Default	Description
branch-with-candidate-code	No	string		Optionally provide a specific branch that contains the candidate code, otherwise the default branch of the repository will be selected.

Outputs

Output	Description
CANDIDATE_BRANCH	The branch that was used to generate release notes from
CANDIDATE_COMMIT	The latest commit hash from the candidate branch
URL	Link to the release candidate

reusable-create-release-notes.yml

Inputs

Input	Required	Type	Default	Description
tag	Yes	string		Tag to associate the release to. Can be new or existing.
auto-clear-release-candidate-notes	No	boolean	true	Whether the notes of the release candidate should be cleared

Outputs

Output	Description
URL	Link to the release

Setup

changelog via release.yml

Create a .github/release.yml

This will define the categorial structure of the release notes. When a pull request label matches an entry in the release.yml, it will be placed under the respective section. It matched against the first label to have an entry in the categories section.

Sample release.yml

changelog:
  categories:
    - title: 🎉 New Features
      labels:
        - new feature
    - title: ✨ Enhancements
      labels:
        - enhancement
    - title: 🛠 Breaking Changes
      labels:
        - breaking change
    - title: 🐛 Bug fixes
      labels:
        - bug
    - title: ⚡️ Optimisations
      labels:
        - optimisation
    - title: 🔭 Observability
      labels:
        - observability
    - title: 🔒️ Security
      labels:
        - security
    - title: 📝 Documentation
      labels:
        - documentation
    - title: 📦️ Dependencies
      labels:
        - dependencies
    - title: Other Changes
      labels:
        - '*'

Integrate

Candidate

A long-lived mutable release-candidate tag can optionally be managed through the action reusable-update-release-candidate-notes.yml.

This will persist a single release instance for candidate changes that moves when changes are being made to your repository.

jobs:
  update-candidate:
    name: Update Release Candidate Notes
    permissions:
      id-token: write
      contents: write
    uses: danielebra/simple-release-notes/.github/workflows/reusable-update-release-candidate-notes.yml
    with:
      branch-with-candidate-code: main

This image demonstrates a release candidate managed by the above workflow.

Latest Release

The latest release is managed by detecting the current latest release before creating a new one. Given this spread, release notes will automatically be generated, alongside a change diff. A release will be published that is now marked as latest. The release title is named after the tag of the release.

jobs:
  create-release
    name: Create Release Notes
    permissions:
      id-token: write
      contents: write
    uses: danielebra/simple-release-notes/.github/workflows/reusable-create-release-notes.yml
    with:
      tag: v1.0.0

The default behaviour of the reusable-create-release-notes workflow will automatically clear the release notes from the candidate release. To disable candidate notes, you can opt-out of this via

with:
  auto-clear-release-candidate-notes: false