Tinychange

Description

A tool for creating tiny changelogs on a fly. Create a tinychange file for every notable change, and then merge them all into the main changelog file with just one command.

This approach is heavily inspired by Changesets.

Main benefits:

• Painless pull request merges. No more merge conflicts in changelog file, as every tinychange is in its own file
• Changes are not tied to a specific commit ol pull request. Not every commit needs a changelog entry, and some commits may require multiple, so let the developer decide what to include.

Installation

From crates.io

$ cargo install --locked tinychange

From NPM

$ npm install -g tinychange

From git

$ cargo install --locked --force --git https://github.com/juh9870/tinychange

From Releases page

Download the binary from the Releases page

As a library

tinychange can also be invoked from a Rust program, for example, as a part of your cargo xtask

$ cargo add tinychange

See the tinychange.rs file for an example of how to invoke the library.

Usage

Use the tinychange command to create and merge tinychanges. This section only covers the basic usage. For more detailed information, use the --help flag.

Initialize configuraion

Before using the tool, you need to initialize the configuration file. This will create a tinychange.toml configuration file, and .tinychange directory in the current working directory, where all the tinychange files will be stored.

$ tinychange init

Create a tinychange

To create a new tinychange, use just run the tinychange command. This will show an interactive prompt where you can fill in the details of the change.

$ tinychange

Author name will be pulled from the active git author/user, if available. If not, you will be prompted for it.

Script usage

You can also manually provide arguments to create a tinychange by using the new subcommand. This is useful for automation or scripting. Use the -I flag to disable the interactive prompts and silence the output.

$ tinychange new --kind Added --message "A changelog" --author juh9870

Merge tinychanges

To merge all the tinychanges into the main changelog file, use the merge command.

$ tinychange merge

Merging behavior

Changelogs files do not have a standard format, and it's impossible to predict every possible format, so the coice was made to target a keep a changelog-like format. The tool assumes the changelog is in the markdown format, with the sections indicated by a number of # characters. The tool will try to find any section whose header contains unreleased (eg. ## [Unreleased]) and append the tinychanges there. If no such section is found, a default ## [Unreleased] section will be created after the first found changelog section, but before the next header. If no changelog section is found, the tool will bail out.