Automate the generation of changelogs by using specific Git commit trailers. loggit allows you to log important changes in your commits and have them collected later into a changelog, so you don't forget--or are too lazy to do it, like me.

Assuming you have Go installed:

go install github.com/y3ro/loggit@latest

You should have $HOME/go/bin in your PATH.

You can use loggit to populate a version changelog and also branch changelogs.

Collect log entries starting from the last "bump-version" commit. By default, it will also create the corresponding version tag.

Quick example:

0. Call loggit from your Git repository's commit-msg hook, passing the first argument to the hook, like so:

loggit $1

1. You have finished a feature or squashed a bug and want to commit the changes, so you add the following to your commit's body:

[...]

log: [FEATURE] Added amazing new feature

[...]

you can replace log: with your preferred key in the configuration file.

Alternatively, you can use the subject of the commit message by using a special log line:

[FEATURE] Added amazing feature

[...]

log: %s

[...]

2. In a later commit, you bump the version of your software and write the corresponding commit message's title:

Bump version 1.3.0

again, you can configure the format of this special commit. See below.

3. Check your changelog to see the added entries and also that a new tag was created, unless you specified otherwise.

You can use the -branch flag to collect all the log entries for the current branch. Normally, you would use this more directly:

loggit -branch

The resulting changelog file will have the branch name prefixed to its name.

This is useful to summarize the work in a particular branch for a merge/pull request.

You can configure loggit using a loggit.json file which can live in the root of your repository or in $HOME/.config/. This is also the order of precedence to choose between the two, if both are available. You can also specify you preferred file anywhere in the file system by using the -config parameter.

Example contents of this file, which are also the default values for each setting:

{
    "BumpVersionMsg": "Bump version",
    "VersionRegexpStr": "\\d+\\.\\d+\\.\\d+",
    "LogGitTrailer: "log:",
    "UseCommitTitleMsg: "%s",
    "ChangelogRelativePath: "CHANGELOG.md",
    "VersionHeader: "# Version ",
    "MasterBranchName: "master",
    "ConfigFileName: "loggit.json",
    "AlsoTag": true
}