@rnx-kit/rn-changelog-generator

@rnx-kit/rn-changelog-generator

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This tool is EXPERIMENTAL - USE WITH CAUTION

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This script used to live in react-native-community/releases, and has moved here as part of deprecating that repo.

Motivation

This script generates a markdown-formatted list of changes between two given git references (e.g. tags).

The script is a little more complex than one might expect for the following reasons:

• Attributing changes to the author’s github handle requires fetching the commit metadata from the github API, rather than relying on a local clone of the react-native repo.

• Due to how react-native’s release process works, we want to be able to exclude previously cherry-picked commits from the changelog entry of the next version.

  However, with git, cherry-picked commits will have different commit hashes than their original counterparts – as they exist in the main branch. Because of this, the next version’s stable branch will include the same changes, except using their original commit hash. This makes it impossible to exclude these commits without further work.

  For this reason, the script will parse the ‘referential revision’ – which is added to each commit message by Facebook’s infrastructure – and use it to resolve to the original commit in the main branch. This resolved commit’s hash is then used in the changelog entry, so the script can find and exclude it from the next version’s entry.

  This cannot be done via the github API and thus relies on a local clone of the react-native repo.

You can read more of the old documentation about it here.

Setup

If you don’t already have a checkout of the react-native repo in a nearby folder:

git clone https://github.com/facebook/react-native.git

Ensure the repo is up-to-date:

pushd react-native
git checkout main
git pull
popd

Usage

Generate a changelog for react-native commits between versions 0.65.0 and 0.66.0:

npx @rnx-kit/rn-changelog-generator --base v0.65.0 --compare v0.66.0 --repo ../../../react-native --changelog ../../../react-native/CHANGELOG.md

As explained above, you will need to have a local clone of react-native, which is referenced by the --repo parameter.

[Optional] Get a Github 'personal acccess token'

This script uses the Github API to fetch commit metadata. This data is accessable without authentication as its public.

You can optionally provide a GitHub personal access token for the --token parameter which may be necessary in case Github API rate-limits your requests.

Instructions to create a GitHub ‘personal access token’:

1. Visit the token settings page.
2. Generate a new token and only give it the public_repo scope.
3. Store this token somewhere secure for future usage.