Automatically Generate Release Notes Using GitHub Actions When Tag Is Pushed

#GitHub #GitHubActions #CI/CD

Introduction

I’ve recently been developing a Chrome extension for tab management called TabTabTab as a personal project. Whenever I released a new version, I would push a tag to GitHub and create a release note manually.

I decided to automate this process because it was getting tedious. So, I turned to GitHub Actions.

Process Flow

The overall process is as follows:

  1. Push a tag to GitHub.
  2. The push of a tag triggers a GitHub Actions workflow.
  3. Within the workflow, a release note is generated.

Workflow Configuration File

I set up the following yaml file as .github/workflows/generate-release-note.yml.

name: Generate Release Note

on:
  push:
    tags:
      - '*'

jobs:
  release:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - name: Generate release note
        uses: softprops/action-gh-release@v1
        with:
          generate_release_notes: true

Here is the part that triggers the workflow on tag push:

on:
  push:
    tags:
      - '*'

For creating a release, I used an action called softprops/action-gh-release.

- name: Generate release note
  uses: softprops/action-gh-release@v1
  with:
    generate_release_notes: true

You can set tag names, release names, etc., but I did not need to specify any because the defaults were sufficient for my needs. However, to generate release notes, I set generate_release_notes to true.

For other settings, please refer to the README.

Generated Release Note

Here is the release note generated by the above configuration. It’s created by github-actions.

ReleaseNote

By the way, the structure of the release note, such as 🎉 Features, is controlled by .github/release.yml.

For more about this, check out the following article if you’re interested:

👉 Categorize GitHub Repository Release Notes by Content for a Nice Look

Conclusion

Now, just by pushing a tag, a release note is automatically generated, eliminating one more hassle during release.

GitHub Actions is incredibly useful for easily solving such mundane tasks.

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