Node Hooked Changelog

This is a simple BASH based changelog generator for NodeJS projects that are versioned using npm version. It uses a git post-commit hook to trigger, and looks for the standard commit message format produced by npm version, e.g. v0.0.1. When it detects a commit that contains a message in this format it runs the generator script and produces a Markdown formatted changelog by default.

You can customize the changelog format by specifying your own simple template files.

Installation

npm install --save node-hooked-changelog

Usage

The changelog generator should work out of the box, but for optimal changelogs you might want to customize a few settings.

You can specify settings for your changelog in your package.json file under the changelog key. Here's an example snippet showing all the available settings:

{
	...
	"changelog": {
		"title": "My Cool Project",
		"commit-url": "https://github.com/jbloggs/my-cool-project/commit/${commitId}",
		"issue-url": "https://github.com/jbloggs/my-cool-project/issues/${issueId}",
		"template": {
			"header": "./changelog-templates/header.template",
			"footer": "./changelog-templates/footer.template",
			"commit": "./changelog-templates/commit.template",
			"issue": "./changelog-templates/issue.template",
			"version": "./changelog-templates/version.template"
		}
	},
	...
}

If not specified sensible defaults will be used for all options. Further explanation of options is shown below:

Configuration options

title

The title to include in the header template, this is used to give a nicely formatted name for your project in the header of your changelog. If not specified it will default to the name property from your package.json.

commit-url

The url to use to link to specific commits, generally this will be a github project url. Available parameters are commitId.

issue-url

The url to use to link to issues, issues are detected in your log messages using the #12345 syntax. If not specified, this will fall back to the bugs url specified in your package.json or empty if neither string is specified.

templates

This object specifies a variety of different templates use to create your changelog, see below for more details.

Templates

Templates are simply text files with standard Bash variable expansions. The options available to templates vary depending on the template, see below for more details. The node-hooked-changelog module comes with basic templates to create a simple Markdown formatted changelog. If you want a different formatting you can override any of the templates by specifying them in your package.json.

header

This is output at the start of your changelog.

Available properties are:

• moduleName - the module name specified in package.json
• title - specified in your package.json under changelog property (see above).

Defaults to:

# ${title} Changelog

footer

This is output at the end of your changelog.

Available properties are:

• moduleName - the module name specified in package.json
• title - specified in your package.json under changelog property (see above).

Defaults to:

*...here be dragons*


Generated with [node-hooked-changelog](http://github.com/SupplyFrame/node-hooked-changelog)

commit

This template is used repeatedly for each commit message that is output into your changelog.

Available properties are:

• commitUrl - the url of this commit (see commit-url for more details)
• version - the version number that includes this commit
• commitId - the commit id for this commit
• commitMessage - the commit message included with this commit

Defaults to:

- ${commitMessage} - [view commit](${commitUrl})

issue

This template is used wherever an issue number is detected in your commit messages, issues are detected by a number prefixed with a #, e.g. #1234.

Available properties are:

• issueUrl - the url to this issue (see issue-url for more details)
• issueId - the id of this issue
• commitId - the commit id for the commit this issue reference was found in

Defaults to:

[#${issueId}](${issueUrl})

version

This template is used whenever a new version tag is encountered in your git log. This serves as a divider for each new version of your application in your changelog.

Available properties are:

• commitUrl - the url of the commit that changed the version (see commit-url for more details)
• version - the version number specified in this commit
• commitId - the commit id for this commit

Defaults to:

##[v${version}](${commitUrl})