release-notes-generator

Setup

pip install release-notes-generator

This will provide a self-documenting command line tool under the name: release_notes

You can ask for help as you would expect: release_notes --help

You will need to set your github access token to use it: export GITHUB_API_TOKEN = <token>

Usage

You can fetch release notes like: release_notes getfor auto_pipeline

By default this will look for an existing release and try to parse out the pr numbers from it's description. Alternatively, you can use a file: release_notes getfor auto_pipeline --source pr_numbers.txt

Either way will output to the console release notes of the following form:

h2. SOME TITLE
CHANGE_TYPE: UI
DESCRIPTION: Some descriptions
JIRA TICKET: LIMS-123
PULL REQUEST: 123
RISK: LOW
RISK DESCRIPTION: Some description

Optionally redirect to a file: release_notes getfor auto_pipeline > release_notes.txt

How this Works

You can look at cli.py for an example of how to use this script.

Essentially, cli.py runs the following where the token variable is looking for GITHUB_API_TOKEN to be set.

ReleaseNoteGenerator(token, repository_name=repository_name).release_notes()
ReleaseNotesFormatter.output(notes)

ReleaseNoteGenerator parses the PR numbers from the latest release, if no release exists it will return nothing. It then passes the PR numbers to the pr fetcher which grabs the descriptions. A good entry point it to look at ReleaseNoteGenerator.release_notes

Future Work

This is a quick and dirty initial implementation and we should expand this for easy reuse.

[Complete] Iteration 1: Packaging and Interface Features

• command line interaction to run with a repository_name arg

# print output to the screen
release_notes auto_pipeline --print

• packaging for easy pip install and use across LIMS projects (ie. use in individual release scripts)
• document API

Iteration 2: Granularity and Robustness Features

• expose the PRFetcher so that we are not coupled to fetching the initial list purely from
• add ability to diff the latest release and previous release and auto generate pr numbers (is this in the ARMS release script?)
• auto generate tag and release adding the PRs to the release notes

Other Features:

• tests
• auto ignore markdown comments
• filter out heading fields in the description and only parse the one line description
• include full pull request links