changelg

Generate a CHANGELOG from your git history. Point it at a range of Conventional Commits and it prints a clean, grouped, Markdown changelog. Zero dependencies — no Rust to install, no config file, no GitHub token, no CI integration. One command, on your machine.

npx changelg --release v1.2.0

## v1.2.0 (2026-06-15)

### ⚠ BREAKING CHANGES

- **auth:** existing tokens are invalidated on deploy. (6667b72)

### Features

- **api:** add cursor pagination (a1b2c3d)
- **auth:** switch to short-lived tokens (6667b72)

### Bug Fixes

- handle an empty response body (e4f5a6b)

Why

You finish a release, mean to write the changelog "later," and three weeks on you're squinting at git log trying to remember what changed. The existing tools each ask for something:

• git-cliff is excellent — but it's a Rust binary you have to install via cargo or a release download, with a config file to learn.
• standard-version is deprecated.
• release-please is powerful but wants GitHub Actions and a workflow.

changelg is the small one. If your commits roughly follow Conventional Commits, it groups them into sections and writes the Markdown. That's it.

Usage

changelg                       # changes since the latest tag → HEAD
changelg v1.2.0                # changes since v1.2.0 (→ HEAD)
changelg v1.2.0..v1.3.0        # an explicit range
changelg --release v1.3.0      # set the heading version
changelg -o CHANGELOG.md       # write to a file (otherwise: stdout)
changelg --release v1.3.0 | cat - CHANGELOG.md | sponge CHANGELOG.md   # prepend

| Option | | |---|---| | --since <ref> | start ref (instead of a range argument) | | --release <name> | heading version (default: target tag, else "Unreleased") | | --all | include docs/refactor/build/ci/test/style/chore + other commits | | --repo-url <url> | base repo URL for commit links (auto-detected from origin) | | --no-links | plain short hashes instead of links | | -o, --output <file> | write to a file instead of stdout |

Sections

feat → Features, fix → Bug Fixes, perf → Performance, and a ! or a BREAKING CHANGE: footer surfaces a ⚠ BREAKING CHANGES section (showing the breaking note). By default the noisier types (docs/chore/refactor/...) are hidden; --all brings them in. Commit hashes become links when an origin remote is detected.

Install

npx changelg                # Node >= 18
pip install changelg        # Python >= 3.8 (byte-for-byte port)

• npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/changelg
• PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/changelg/
• GitHub: https://github.com/jjdoor/changelg · changelg-py

License

MIT