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Please don't forget to write the changelog

Basti Ortiz on August 29, 2019

An often overlooked, underappreciated, and seemingly mundane stage of the development cycle is the process of writing a changelog. For those who ar...
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Clive Da

no need to write it ! just autogen from your github commits !

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Basti Ortiz

Yup, that's fine, too! But of course, a personal touch is always better than automatically generated changelogs. 😉

But if the time and resource constraints are indeed limited, then that is a viable option.

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JoelBonetR 🥇

Best thing that worked to me is to squash on merge request, so you can use whatever commit message you want during development, use a nice "changelog" message just on the merge request, then you can generate the entire changelog from the main branch and it will be perfectly fine. Best of both worlds! 😁

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Basti Ortiz

True enough, I've been seeing this more frequently in many open-source projects thanks to the rise of GitHub Actions and other automations. I personally still prefer the labor of love that comes from a handwritten changelog1, but something is better than nothing. I cannot complain about that.


  1. See this recent example from the Bevy game engine. 

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JoelBonetR 🥇

You can achieve exactly the same!
you put a bit of effort and love the same way, just on a different stage 😂
Just write your MR comments in markdown and post-it with a parser process (just like dev.to does in posts and comments) 😁

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Stephen Ng'etich

Preach preach... Loved the article

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Basti Ortiz

Thanks! I'm glad you liked it. 😉

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Jason C. McDonald

Great article, as always!

P.S. You might consider adding the #opensource tag.

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Basti Ortiz • Edited

Sure! Will do. Never really thought it would be particularly relevant until you mentioned it.

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Waylon Walker

💯