GitHub actions example for automatic release drafts and changelog.md creation

What are GitHub actions?

That is well described in this post by Brian Douglas. He has also an entire post series about tips around GitHub actions.

Which problem should be solved?

There are different solutions to create automatic releases based on certain criteria. Again Brian Douglas pointed out some possibilities in this post.

For this open-source project, the requirement was to determine the release structure via labels at the pull request. This was preferred over conventional commits. Also, not every merged pull request should automatically trigger a new release. Therefore, a draft is the right way to collect the changes and publish a version whenever needed.

Addionatylly to the GitHub releases, a changelog.md helps see the version history, for example, directly in the code editor. That changelog.md should be updated every time a release is published.

The combination Release Drafter and gren is the approach to solve the problem.

Configure Release Drafter

To configure Release Drafter in the default way, it needs two files and the according labels.

This template describes the structure of the release draft and the needed labels. The full path is .github/release-drafter.yml

name-template: 'v$RESOLVED_VERSION 🌈'
tag-template: 'v$RESOLVED_VERSION'
categories:
  - title: '🚀 Features'
    labels:
      - 'feature'
      - 'enhancement'
  - title: '🐛 Bug Fixes'
    labels:
      - 'fix'
      - 'bugfix'
      - 'bug'
  - title: '🧰 Maintenance'
    label: 'chore'
  - title: '🧺 Miscellaneous' #Everything except ABAP
    label: 'misc'
change-template: '- $TITLE @$AUTHOR (#$NUMBER)'
change-title-escapes: '\<*_&' # You can add # and @ to disable mentions, and add ` to disable code blocks.
version-resolver:
  major:
    labels:
      - 'major'
  minor:
    labels:
      - 'minor'
  patch:
    labels:
      - 'patch'
  default: patch
template: |
  ## Changes
  $CHANGES

The GitHub actions configuration like this:

github/workflows/release-drafter.yml

name: Release Drafter

on:
  push:
    # branches to consider in the event; optional, defaults to all
    branches:
      - main

jobs:
  update_release_draft:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      # Drafts your next Release notes as Pull Requests are merged into "master"
      - uses: release-drafter/release-drafter@v5
        env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: $

Configure gren

The releases are published manually at certain times. This trigger this configuration.

name: "update changelog"
on:
  release:
    types: [published]

jobs:
  update-changelog:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v2

    - name: Update changelog
      run: |
        npm install github-release-notes
        export GREN_GITHUB_TOKEN=$
        npm run overrideChangelog
    - name: Create Pull Request
      uses: peter-evans/create-pull-request@v3
      with:
        commit-message: update changelog
        title: Update Changelog
        body: Update changelog to reflect release changes
        branch: update-changelog
        base: main

The command "overrideChangelog": "gren changelog --override" from the package.json update then the changelog.md.

Because of the main branch protection, it’s not possible to push the changes directly back. This will do this via a pull request with the GitHub action create-pull-request.

How it looks like

The collection of the changes in a release draft.

The labels in a pull request.

The result in the GitHub release.

The result in the CHANGELOG.md.

Code

abap-observability-tools / abap-log-exporter

Exports SAP Netweaver logs to a log system of your choice.

abap-log-exporter 🚧 WIP

architecture

documentation

components

component	variant	status
reader	BAL	✔️
SMICM	open
SM21	#41
converter	GELF	✔️
Loki	✔️
connector	GELF	✔️
Loki	✔️

customizing

Different scenarios can be customized via transaction ZALE_CONFIG. This are the fields for each sceanrio

Field	Description
reader class	class for the reader component
converter class	class for the converter component
connector url	URL to the log tool e.g. GrayLog
connector class	class for the connector component

local tests

local test folder

⚠️ instead of localhost the URLs have to be customized with the IP of the Ethernet Adapter

View on GitHub