kacl

Keep a Changelog tooling for linting and automatically releasing changelogs

Usage

Requirements

• Node 8+
• package.json contains a valid git repository URL

Installation

npm i -D @brightcove/kacl

You can also install globally to easily initialize changelogs in your projects:

npm i -g @brightcove/kacl

CLI Usage

If installed globally, you can run the kacl command. If not, you can run it from your project's node_modules folder: ./node_modules/.bin/kacl

Usage: kacl init|lint|prerelease|release

  init       - Initializes a new CHANGELOG.md
  lint       - Lints your changelog for errors
  prerelease - Checks the requirements for creating a new release (should be added to the "preversion" script)
  release    - Creates a new release matching your package.json version (should be added to the "version" script)

Usage in package.json

kacl is most effective when added to package.json scripts as it can be used to completely automate changelog changes when running npm version. The following is a recommendation for setting up package.json scripts to use kacl.

{
  "scripts": {
    "posttest": "kacl lint",
    "preversion": "kacl prerelease",
    "version": "kacl release && git add CHANGELOG.md"
  }
}

This setup does the following:

• Lints your changelog after running tests
• Checks the changelog before bumping the version with npm version to ensure there is an unreleased entry
• Updates the changelog and adds it to git after the version has been bumped with npm version. The changelog changes will automatically be committed as part of npm version.

Usage with gh-release

gh-release is a tool which will automatically create a tag and release on GitHub. It pairs nicely with kacl, and with both tools you can completely automate your version bumping. The following is a recommendation for setting up package.json scripts to use kacl with gh-release.

{
  "scripts": {
    "posttest": "kacl lint",
    "preversion": "kacl prerelease",
    "version": "kacl release && git add CHANGELOG.md",
    "postversion": "git push && gh-release"
  }
}

This performs the same steps as what's laid out in the Usage in package.json section, with the addition of the following:

• Pushes the new version to GitHub and creates a GitHub release using the updated changelog.

Info

• Status: Abandoned
• Type: Utility
• Versioning: Semantic Versioning

Maintainers

None. The former lead maintainer, who has left Brightcove, is

• Ted Janeczko - @tjaneczko

Contributions

Contributions are welcome, please see the contributing guidelines.

Issues and Questions

This project uses github issues, please file issues and questions here.

Attributions and Thanks

This project uses the keep-a-changelog library from Oscar Otero for parsing and manipulating changelogs. It's an awesome library which you should definitely check out if you're interested in helping improve project changelogs.