npm-fetch-changelog

fetch the changelog for an npm package from GitHub

How it works

Right now only packages hosted on GitHub are supported. npm-fetch-changelog will get the package info and repository URL from npm, then try to fetch the GitHub release for each relevant version tag. If no GitHub release is found it will fall back to trying to parse the package's CHANGELOG.md or changelog.md. GitHub releases are way more reliable for this purpose though, so please use them!

Caveats

npm-fetch-changelog inevitably fails to find changelog entries for some packages/releases because many maintainers are not very detail-oriented about it (and don't choose to use excellent tools that would do the work for them, like semantic-release).

However, I've also seen cases where some versions were never published to npm (for instance, at the time of writing, superagent version 5.0.0 was never published to npm, yet it does have a changelog entry). npm-fetch-changelog currently only displays changelog entries for published versions.

API Tokens

GitHub heavily rate limits public API requests, but allows more throughput for authenticated requests. If you set the GH_TOKEN environment variable to a personal access token, npm-fetch-changelog will use it when requesting GitHub releases. Otherwise npm-fetch-changelog will try to get it from gh auth token (gh is the GitHub CLI).

npm-fetch-changelog will also use the NPM_TOKEN environment variable or try to get the npm token from your ~/.npmrc, so that it can get information for private packages you request.

You can also store one or both of these tokesn in ~/.config/npm-fetch-changelog.json:

{
  "githubToken": "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx",
  "npmToken": "xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx"
}

CLI

npm i -g npm-fetch-changelog

npm-fetch-changelog <package name>[@<range>]
what-broke <package name>[@<range>]

Prints changelog entries fetched from GitHub for each version released on npm in the given range.

what-broke is just a shortcut for npm-fetch-changelog --no-minor.

Options:

-r, --range

semver version range to get changelog entries for, e.g. ^7.0.0 (defaults to > the version installed in the working directory, if it exists)

You can also pass the range together with the package name (you might need to quote it):

npm-fetch-changelog 'foo@>=2'

--json

output JSON instead of Markdown

--major

exclude minor and patch versions

--minor

exclude patch versions

--pre

include prerelease versions

Node.js API

(the CLI just uses this under the hood)

import { fetchChangelog } from 'npm-fetch-changelog'

async function fetchChangelog(
  package: string,
  options?: {
    include?:
      | (
          | ((version: string) => boolean)
          | {
              range?: ?string
              prerelease?: ?boolean
              minor?: ?boolean
              patch?: ?boolean
            }
        )
      | null
  }
): Promise<
  Record<
    string,
    {
      version: string
      header: string
      body?: string
      date?: Date
      error?: Error
    }
  >
>