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phly/keep-a-changelog

Manage your Keep-A-Changelog-formatted CHANGELOG.md via CLI tooling!

Changelog files grow constantly, and the amount of markup in them can cause editors and mergetools to balk at times. Additionally, 99% of the time as a maintainer, all you really want to do is:

• Add an entry to the relevant portion of the most recent version in the changelog.
• View or edit a changelog version.
• Extract a changelog version for use in a tag or release.
• List, create, and close project milestones.

This tool provides those features and more, allowing you to quickly and easily handle changelogs for your project.

Installation

Installation is via Composer, and it may be installed globally or within a project.

Per-Project Installation

Choose this option if you want to ensure all maintainers of your project use the tooling to manage the changelog.

$ composer require --dev phly/keep-a-changelog

Invocation will then be via ./vendor/bin/keep-a-changelog; when you see keep-a-changelog in examples in this documentation, this is what is meant.

To update, run:

$ composer update phly/keep-a-changelog

or, to ensure you get at least a specific version:

# Require at least version 2.1.0:
$ composer require "phly/keep-a-changelog:^2.1.0"

Global Installation

When installing globally, you have two options: using composer global, or using a local checkout.

Composer Global

To use composer:

$ composer global require phly/keep-a-changelog

If you install globally, ensure you add global composer vendor binaries directory to your $PATH environment variable. You can get its location with following command:

$ composer global config bin-dir --absolute

You can add the following line to your shell profile to auto-add it to your PATH:

export PATH=$(composer global config bin-dir --absolute):$PATH

Once setup this way, you can call keep-a-changelog instead of ./vendor/bin/keep-a-changelog.

PHAR file

Since version 2.3.0, we have offered standalone PHAR binaries. These are available under the downloads section for each release. To retrieve the latest, you can always use the following url:

• https://github.com/phly/keep-a-changelog/releases/latest/download/keep-a-changelog.phar

Make the file executable (e.g., chmod 755 keep-a-changelog.phar), place it in your $PATH, and, optionally, remove the .phar suffix

At the time of writing, the PHAR distribution is not yet capable of self-updating or checking for updates.

Local Checkout

Alternately, you can check it out locally, and add its binary to your path. I recommend:

• Checking it out to an $XDG_DATA_DIRS location, such as in the $HOME/.local tree.
• Creating a script on your $PATH (e.g. $HOME/.local/bin) that invokes the package binary using a specific PHP version. I recommend this in the off-chance that you use multiple PHP versions, as it guarantees that the PHP version used will work with it.

# Clone the repo:
$ mkdir -p $HOME/.local/src/github.com/phly
$ cd $HOME/.local/src/github.com/phly
$ git clone https://github.com/phly/keep-a-changelog.git
$ cd keep-a-changelog
# Checkout the latest tagged version; e.g. 2.1.0:
$ git checkout 2.1.0
# Install dependencies:
$ composer install
# Create the script:
$ echo "#!/usr/bin/bash\n/usr/bin/php7.2 \$HOME/.local/src/github.com/phly/keep-a-changelog/bin/keep-a-changelog \$@" > $HOME/.local/bin/keep-a-changelog
$ chmod 755 $HOME/.local/bin/keep-a-changelog

To update:

$ cd $HOME/.local/src/github.com/phly/keep-a-changelog
$ git fetch origin
$ git checkout <new version>
$ composer install

Usage

To use the tooling:

$ keep-a-changelog

This will provide you with a list of commands. You can get detailed help for each command using:

$ keep-a-changelog help <command>

Available Commands:

• bump, bump:bugfix, and bump:patch: Create a new changelog entry for the next bugfix release.
• bump:minor: Create a new changelog entry for the next minor release.
• bump:major: Create a new changelog entry for the next major release.
• bump:to-version: Create a new changelog entry for a user-specified version.
• changelog:edit-links (since 2.1.0): Edit reference links from the end of the changelog file.
• changelog:new: Create a new changelog file.
• config:create: Create one or more configuration files.
• config:edit: Edit a configuration file.
• config:remove: Remove a configuration file.
• config:show: Show one or more configuration files.
• entry:added: Create a changelog entry in the "Added" section.
• entry:changed: Create a changelog entry in the "Changed" section.
• entry:deprecated: Create a changelog entry in the "Deprecated" section.
• entry:removed: Create a changelog entry in the "Removed" section.
• entry:fixed: Create a changelog entry in the "Fixed" section.
• unreleased:create: Create a new "Unreleased" entry at the top of thee changelog file.
• unreleased:promote: Rename the "Unreleased" entry with the provided version, setting the release date.
• version:edit: Edit a full changelog version and its entries.
• version:list: List all changelog versions currently in the file.
• version:ready: Mark a changelog version ready for release by setting its date.
• version:release: create a new release on your given provider, using the relevant changelog entry. This command also pushes the related tag.
• version:remove: Remove the given changelog version and its entries.
• version:show: Show the given changelog version and its entries.
• version:tag: Create a new tag, using the relevant changelog entry. Creates signed tags.

But wait, there's more!

You can configure the changelog file to use, the package name to use when creating releases or generating links for changelog entries, the git remote to push tags to, and where to create releases.

• Interested? Read more about configuration.

When generating issue and patch links to use with your changelog entries, and when creating releases, the tooling works with GitHub and GitLab out-of-the-box, but you can also extend it!

• Interested? Read more about providers.