Herodotus

Herodotus, an ancient greek historian and story teller will help you keep a changelog updated.

Oftentimes you don't think about the changelog when you make changes to your project. Then, when it's time to cut a release, you've really lost momentum of how those changes affect your users. You thought about these things days or weeks ago, when you committed them to the repo.

Herodotus can help by going over your git history since a particular release and extracting your notes. Obviously, not every commit will contain useful or changelog worthy information, so we'll use the commit message format to communicate what should go in the changelog. Here are the rules:

• Tag every release, so that it is easy to tell Herodotus how far back to start looking for changes.
• To start writing notes for use in the changelog, use the following format on your git commit message:

Real commit message subject

Some more info on the commit

Changelog:
Anything below this line will go on the changelog. Tell your users how to
upgrade the app, what has been depracated, what will break, etc.

It doesn't need to be exact either. Herodotus will simply extract these comments, format them by adding the author and date, and either append them to your CHANGES file, or print them out to standard out. Once it's there you can tweak it at will before pushing. But the important pieces have been thought out at the time when you wrote the software changes - and was written right on the commit message, and so maintaining the changelog could be easier.

Installation

Add herodotus to your Gemfile and run bundle.

If you're not using bundler, install via gem install herodotus

Then add require 'herodotus/tasks' to your Rakefile. This will provide the rake tasks with which you interface with herodotus.

Usage

Herodotus provides a couple of rake tasks:

rake -T
rake herodotus:append[since_ref]  # Appends changes to your changelog
rake herodotus:print[since_ref]   # Prints out the change log from git

You can optionally pass the reference (usually a tag) from which herodotus will start to look for changelog messages in your commits. Note that some shells require you to wrap the rake task in double quotes when passing arguments. For example: rake "herodotus:print[v1]"

Configuring

You can configure Herodotus. Drop this somewhere sensible like an initializer or anywhere where it loads prior to running the rake tasks:

Herodotus::Configuration.run do |config|
  config.base_path          = '/path/to/project/root'
  config.changelog_filename = 'CHANGELOG.md'
end

License

Herodotus is distributed under the MIT license.

Copyright 2011 - Harold Giménez