Changelog

Command line app and library to produce a changelog for npm packages and github projects.

Command-line Usage

Usage: changelog {npm package name or github repo url}

• Github urls can be any format, such as https://github.com/dylang/changelog or git@github.com:dylang/changelog.git or even just github.com/dylang/changelog.
• Node projects without the repository url defined in the package.json will not work.

Examples

Node Package

$ changelog request

2.0.2 / 2011-07-29
==================

* Return destination stream from pipe().

2.0.1 / 2011-07-21
==================

* Drastically improved header handling.
* valid semver.
---cut for space---

Github Repo

$ changelog https://github.com/joyent/node

2011-08-01
==========

  * windows: Fix test-module-load-list
  * Remove debug code
  * child_process_uv: Handle spawn errors
  * Upgrade libuv to 023f99a

2011-07-31
==========

  * link to rpcrt4 and ole32 on win32
  * Upgrade libuv to e9bee51
  * child_process_uv: fix test/simple/test-child-process-env
  * child_process_uv: fix simple/test-child-process-cwd
  * child_process_uv: add exec, fix simple/test-child-process-exec-cwd
  * Forgot to add child_process_uv.js
  * initial pass at lib/child_process_uv.js
  ---cut for space---

Node API

var Changelog = require('changelog');

Changelog.npm('request', callback);
Changelog.github('joyent/node', callback);

function callback(err, changelog) {
    //changelog is an array of "versions"
    //With npm each "version" corresponds to all changes for that build pushed on npm
    //With github each "version" is one GMT day of changes
    changelog.forEach(function(version) {
        console.log(version.version); //npm only
        console.log(version.date);    //JS Date
        //version.changes is an array of commit messages for that version
        version.changes.forEach(function(change) {
            console.log(' * ' + change);
        });
    });
}

How it works

• Changelog works with Node packages by looking at the repository url. Packages without this set will not work.
• Changes are collected using a single Github V3 API call that returns 100 changes. This means it will currently not show more than 100 changes.
• Changelog attempts to guestimate the approprate version number for each Github commit message based on the timestamp of the change and packages are published.
• It will not work with packages in other repos such as BitBucket.
• Changelog cannot access history for private repos.

Future

• Work with more package managers such as brew and gem? These are beyond my expertise but I would be happy to merge in pull requests.
• Integrate into npm update?
• Integrate into git pull?
• Warn when there are more than 100 commits available.
• Support paging Github's API to aquire more than 100 commits.
• Output options: --json, --markdown --text --rss --atom
• Option to show code diff.
• Ability to set the start and end version.
• Output errors via standard error, etc.

Install

Using npm just do:

npm-g install changelog

The -g installs changelog globally so you can use the command line version anywhere.

About

Dylan Greene built this because he was always curious what was changed when doing npm update.