Automate release notes with GitHub

  • 5 minutes

After learning how to create and manage release tags in your repository, you'll learn how to set up automatically generated release notes for your GitHub releases.

You can create an overview of what's included in a release, and you can also customize your automated release notes.

You can use labels to create custom categories to organize pull requests. You can also choose to include or exclude specific labels and users from the output.

Creating automatically generated release notes

When setting up your release, you have the option "Autogenerate release notes" to include all changes between your tag and the last release. If you never created a release before, it includes all changes from your repository.

Screenshot of how to create release notes from GitHub.

You can choose to customize it or leave it as it is.

Setting up automatically generated release notes template

You can customize the autogenerated release notes template by following these steps:

  1. Go to your repository and create a new file.

    Screenshot of how to create a new file on GitHub.

  2. Use the name .github/release.yml to create the release.yml file in the .github directory.

    Screenshot of how to create release.yml file on GitHub.

  3. Write in YAML format, which pulls request labels and authors you want to exclude from this release. You can also create new categories and list the pull request labels in each. For more information about setup options, see Automatically generated release notes - GitHub Docs.

    Example setup:

    # .github/release.yml

changelog:
  exclude:
    labels:
    - ignore-for-release
    authors:
    - octocat
  categories:
    - title: Breaking Changes 🛠
      labels:
        - Semver-Major
        - breaking-change
    - title: Exciting New Features 🎉
      labels:
        - Semver-Minor
        - enhancement
    - title: Other Changes
      labels:
        - *

  4. Commit your new file.

    Screenshot of how to commit new file on GitHub.

  5. Try to create a new release and select + Auto-generate release notes to see how the template works.

For more information, see: