Drafts your next release notes as pull requests are merged into master. Built with Probot.

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Usage

You can use Release Drafter as a GitHub Action, by configuring your .github/main.workflow file with the following:

workflow "Push" {
  on = "push"
  resolves = ["Draft Release"]
}

action "Draft Release" {
  uses = "toolmantim/[email protected]"
  secrets = ["GITHUB_TOKEN"]
}

You can also install the Release Drafter GitHub App, choosing the repositories you want releases automatically created.

Once you’ve added Release Drafter to your repository, it can be enabled by adding a .github/release-drafter.yml configuration file to each repository.

Example

For example, take the following .github/release-drafter.yml file in a repository:

template: |
  ## What’s Changed

  $CHANGES

As pull requests are merged, a draft release is kept up-to-date listing the changes, ready to publish when you’re ready:

The following is a more complicated configuration, which categorises the changes into headings, and automatically suggests the next version number:

name-template: 'v$NEXT_PATCH_VERSION 🌈'
tag-template: 'v$NEXT_PATCH_VERSION'
categories:
  - title: '🚀 Features'
    labels:
      - 'feature'
      - 'enhancement'
  - title: '🐛 Bug Fixes'
    labels:
      - 'fix'
      - 'bugfix'
      - 'bug'
  - title: '🧰 Maintenance'
    label: 'chore'
change-template: '- $TITLE @$AUTHOR (#$NUMBER)'
template: |
  ## Changes

  $CHANGES

Configuration Options

You can configure Release Drafter using the following key in your .github/release-drafter.yml file:

Key	Required	Description
template	Required	The template for the body of the draft release. Use template variables to insert values.
name-template	Optional	The template for the name of the draft release. For example: "v$NEXT_PATCH_VERSION".
tag-template	Optional	The template for the tag of the draft release. For example: "v$NEXT_PATCH_VERSION".
version-template	Optional	The template to use when calculating the next version number for the release. Useful for projects that don't use semantic versioning. Default: "$MAJOR.$MINOR.$PATCH"
change-template	Optional	The template to use for each merged pull request. Use change template variables to insert values. Default: "* $TITLE (#$NUMBER) @$AUTHOR".
no-changes-template	Optional	The template to use for when there’s no changes. Default: "* No changes".
branches	Optional	The branches to listen for configuration updates to .github/release-drafter.yml and for merge commits. Useful if you want to test the app on a pull request branch. Default is the repository’s default branch.
categories	Optional	Categorize pull requests using labels. Refer to Categorize Pull Requests to learn more about this option.
exclude-lables	Optional	Exclude pull requests using labels. Refer to Exclude Pull Requests to learn more about this option.
replacers	Optional	Search and replace content in the generated changelog body. Refer to Replacers to learn more about this option.
sort-direction	Optional	Sort changelog by merged date in ascending or descending order. Can be one of: ascending, descending. Default: descending.

Release Drafter also supports Probot Config, if you want to store your configuration files in a central repository. This allows you to share configurations between projects, and create a organization-wide configuration file by creating a repository named .github with the file .github/release-drafter.yml.

Template Variables

You can use any of the following variables in your template:

Variable	Description
$CHANGES	The markdown list of pull requests that have been merged.
$CONTRIBUTORS	A comma separated list of contributors to this release (pull request authors, commit authors, and commit committers).
$PREVIOUS_TAG	The previous releases’s tag.

Next Version Variables

You can use any of the following variables in your template, name-template and tag-template:

Variable	Description
$NEXT_PATCH_VERSION	The next patch version number. For example, if the last tag or release was v1.2.3, the value would be v1.2.4. This is the most commonly used value.
$NEXT_MINOR_VERSION	The next minor version number. For example, if the last tag or release was v1.2.3, the value would be v1.3.0.
$NEXT_MAJOR_VERSION	The next major version number. For example, if the last tag or release was v1.2.3, the value would be v2.0.0.

Version Template Variables

You can use any of the following variables in version-template to format the $NEXT_{PATCH,MINOR,MAJOR}_VERSION variables:

Variable	Description
$PATCH	The patch version number.
$MINOR	The minor version number.
$MAJOR	The major version number.

Change Template Variables

You can use any of the following variables in change-template:

Variable	Description
$NUMBER	The number of the pull request, e.g. 42.
$TITLE	The title of the pull request, e.g. Add alien technology.
$AUTHOR	The pull request author’s username, e.g. gracehopper.

Categorize Pull Requests

With the categories option you can categorize pull requests in release notes using labels. For example, append the following to your .github/release-drafter.yml file:

categories:
  - title: '🚀 Features'
    label: 'feature'
  - title: '🐛 Bug Fixes'
    labels:
      - 'fix'
      - 'bugfix'
      - 'bug'

Pull requests with the label "feature" or "fix" will now be grouped together:

Adding such labels to your PRs can be automated by using PR Labeler or Probot Auto Labeler.

Exclude Pull Requests

With the exclude-labels option you can exclude pull requests from the release notes using labels. For example, append the following to your .github/release-drafter.yml file:

exclude-labels:
  - 'skip-changelog'

Pull requests with the label "skip-changelog" will now be excluded from the release draft.

Replacers

You can search and replace content in the generated changelog body, using regular expressions, with the replacers option. Each replacer is applied in order.

replacers:
  - search: '/CVE-(\d{4})-(\d+)/g'
    replace: 'https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-$1-$2'
  - search: 'myname'
    replace: 'My Name'

Projects that don't use Semantic Versioning

If your project doesn't follow Semantic Versioning you can still use Release Drafter, but you may want to set the version-template option to customize how the $NEXT_{PATCH,MINOR,MAJOR}_VERSION environment variables are generated.

For example, if your project doesn't use patch version numbers, you can set version-template to $MAJOR.$MINOR. If the current release is version 1.0, then $NEXT_MINOR_VERSION will be 1.1.

GitHub Installation Permissions

Release Drafter requires full write, because GitHub does not offer a limited scope for only writing releases. Don't install Release Drafter to your entire GitHub account — only add the repositories you want to draft releases on.

Developing

If you have Node v10+ installed locally, you can run the tests, and a local app, using the following commands:

# Install dependencies
yarn

# Run the tests
npm test

# Run the app locally
npm run dev

Once you've started the app, visit localhost:3000 and you'll get step-by-step instructions for installing it in your GitHub account so you can start pushing commits and testing it locally.

If you don’t have Node installed, you can use Docker Compose:

# Run the tests
docker-compose run --rm app npm test

Contributing

Third-party contributions are welcome! 🙏🏼 See CONTRIBUTING.md for step-by-step instructions.

If you need help or have a question, let me know via a GitHub issue.

Deployment

If you want to deploy your own copy of Release Drafter, follow the Probot Deployment Guide.

Releasing

Run the following command:

git checkout master && git pull && npm version [major | minor | patch]

The command does the following:

• Ensures you’re on master and don’t have local, un-commited changes
• Bumps the version number in package.json based on major, minor or patch
• Runs the postversion npm script in package.json, which:
  • Pushes the tag to GitHub
  • Publishes the npm release
  • Deploys to Now
  • Opens the GitHub releases page so you can publish the release notes