GitReleaseNotes

Utility which makes it really easy to generate release notes for your Git project. Works with GitHub, Jira and YouTrack. TFS Support coming soon

Have a look at the release notes in this Repo for a sample of what is generated by GitReleaseNotes

Install

choco install GitReleaseNotes.Portable

NOTE: This used to be GitReleaseNotes, we have moved to the proper chocolatey naming convention. We have created a dependency so it will still work, but it is something to keep in mind.

This will use Chocolatey to install GitReleaseNotes into your %path%, ready to be used for any project

Usage

GitReleaseNotes must be run inside a git repository.

GitReleaseNotes.exe . /OutputFile ReleaseNotes.md

This will write ReleaseNotes.md into the root of your repo, the release notes are generated by:

• Use the git remote to connect to your issue tracker (if possible, i.e issue tracker is GitHub)
  • Otherwise specify the issue tracker on the command line (/IssueTracker Jira /JiraServer MyJiraServer as well as project name, check /? for more info)
• Find closed issues since the last release and generate your release notes
• Use /allTags to generate complete release notes for all releases
• If the release notes are already generated, GitReleaseNotes will append new closed issues to your release notes, meaning all custom edits will be retained
• Writes out the release notes following SemanticReleaseNotes.org

You can also use GitReleaseNotes to create a GitHub release, and generate the release notes automatically allowing fully automated releases including release notes generation.

If you use GitHub milestones to manage your releases GitHubReleaseNotes is a similar project.

Versioning a release

GitVersion is another project which can help you generate version numbers and make following Semantic Versions easily

Publishing a release

Initial versions of this tool allowed publishing to GitHub. This has been removed.

To easily create and publish releases, use one of the following alternatives:

• GitHub => GitReleaseManager or On NuGet
• Jira => JiraCli

To use this workflow you should track the current releases release notes in the repo, then on publish just take the file contents as the description with the above tool.