Adding a Changelog to GitHub Releases with Travis

by Liam on January 7, 2019 under travis

1 minute read

You can add a changelog to your GitHub releases with very little work, just by grabbing the commit messages between the previous tag and the current one. This makes the process entirely dynamic, with no extra management required.

You’ll need something like this in your .travis.yml:

before_deploy:
  - export CHANGELOG=$(git log $(git describe --abbrev=0 --tags "${TRAVIS_TAG}^")..$TRAVIS_TAG --pretty=format:'<li> <a href="http://github.com/your-username/your-project/commit/%H">view commit &bull;</a> %s</li> ' --reverse | while read line; do echo -n "$line "; done
)
deploy:
  provider: releases
  skip_cleanup: true
  api_key: ...
  name: "My Program $TRAVIS_TAG"
  body: ${CHANGELOG}
  on:
    tags: true

When your build is done, you should see:

Release

github, git, releases, changelog

I feedback.
Let me know what you think of this article on twitter @liam_galvin or leave a comment below!