Changelog based release Action

GitHub Action for creating changelog based GitHub Releases

---

• Requirements
  • Tag section
• Usage
  • Basic usage
  • Customizing
  • Outputs
  • Permissions
• License

Requirements

As this Action uses the changelog2version to parse and extract informations from a changelog, the requirements for the changelog format have to meet certain criterias.

Tag section

The header of an entry in the changelog has to follow the following format if not specified differently with the version-line-regex and/or semver-line-regex option in the workflow.

This changelog entry shall follow the semantic version pattern and shall match the following pattern:

## [x.y.z] - yyyy-mm-dd or ## [x.y.z] - yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss

The line shall start with two hashtags (##) followed by a single space ( ). The semver version with x, y and z as non-negative integers, seperated by a dot (.) and surrounded by square brackets ([]). Followed by a space ( ), a dash (-), another space ( ) and the ISO8601 formatted date. Additional timestamps after the date, seperated from the date by a single space ( ) or a capital (T), are optional. The semantic version tag inside the square brackets ([]) supports the full semantic versioning scope.

Examples:

• ## [1.2.3] - 2022-11-13
• ## [1.2.3-alpha-a.b-c-somethinglong+build.1-aef.1-its-okay] - 2022-11-13T12:34:56

The changelog of this repo is an example of how the changelog shall look like to be parsable with the default changelog2version settings.

Usage

Basic usage

With the default values used a GitHub release and tag based on the changelog located in the project root will be created. For further details check the customizing section

See action.yml

name: Create release

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main

permissions:
  contents: write

jobs:
  release:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    name: Release
    steps:
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - name: 'Create changelog based release'
        uses: brainelectronics/changelog-based-release@v1

Customizing

The following are optional as step.with keys

Name	Type	Description
github-token	String	Secret GitHub Personal Access Token. Defaults to ${{ github.token }}
changelog-path	String	Path to changelog used for releasing. Default to changelog.md
tag-name-prefix	String	Prefix of tag name before extraced x.y.z from changelog, e.g. v to get v1.2.3
tag-name-extension	String	Extension of tag name after extracted x.y.z from changelog, e.g. ${{ github.sha }} to get 1.2.3${{ github.sha }}. Defaults to -rc${{ github.run_number }}.dev${{ github.event.number }} e.g. 1.2.3-rc21.dev
release-name-prefix	String	Prefix of release name before extracted x.y.z from changelog, e.g. Release of to get Release of 1.2.3
release-name-extension	String	Extension of release name after extracted x.y.z from changelog, e.g. -rc to get 1.2.3-rc. Defaults to -rc${{ github.run_number }}.dev${{ github.event.number }} e.g. 1.2.3-rc21.dev
draft-release	Boolean	Indicator of whether or not this release is a draft. Defaults to false
prerelease	Boolean	Indicator of whether or not is a prerelease. Defaults to false

steps:
  - name: Checkout
    uses: actions/checkout@v3
  - name: 'Create changelog based release'
    uses: brainelectronics/changelog-based-release@v1
    with:
      # note you'll typically need to create a personal access token
      # with permissions to create releases in the other repo
      # or you set the "contents" permissions to "write" as in this example
      github-token:  ${{ secrets.CUSTOM_GITHUB_TOKEN }}
      changelog-path: path/to/changelog.md
      tag-name-prefix: 'v'
      tag-name-extension: '+${{ github.sha }}'
      release-name-prefix: 'Release of '
      release-name-extension: '-rc'
      draft-release: true
      prerelease: true

Outputs

The Action provides the following output variables

Name	Type	Description
latest-description	String	Content of latest changelog entry
latest-version	String	Latest changelog version

steps:
  - name: Checkout
    uses: actions/checkout@v3
  - name: 'Create changelog based release'
    uses: brainelectronics/changelog-based-release@v1
    id: changelog-release
  - name: Report action output
    run: |
      echo "Latest changelog change description: ${{ steps.changelog-release.outputs.latest-description }}"
      echo "Latest changelog version: ${{ steps.changelog-release.outputs.latest-version }}"

Permissions

This Action requires the following permissions on the GitHub integration token:

permissions:
  contents: write

GitHub token permissions can be set for an individual job, workflow, or for Actions as a whole.

License

The scripts and documentation in this project are released under the MIT License