A GitHub Action to generate the list of commit messages between two commits. For instance, this can be used to generate very basic changelogs or release notes between builds.

Optional SHA hash for the commit that should be used as the starting commit. Defaults to the initial commit of the repository.

Optional SHA hash for the commit that should be used as the ending commit. Defaults to the current commit (i.e. ${{ github.sha }}).

Optional Path to the file to save the commit messages to, including file extension. Instead of using the commit-messages output, this option can be useful if there is a need to preserve the contents of the commit message exactly, so that single quotes ' and double quotes " are not evaluated or removed from the output when expanded by the GitHub Actions ${{ }} variable syntax.

The commit messages generated from the commit messages between begin-sha and end-sha.

steps:
  - name: Generate commit messages
    id: commit-messages
    uses: tylermilner/commit-messages-between-commits-action@v1
    with:
      begin-sha: begin_sha_here
      commit-messages-file: commit-messages.txt
  - name: Use commit messages
    run: |
      echo "Commit messages:"
      cat commit-messages.txt

For the output, each commit message is prefixed with a - and separated by a newline.

An example output might look something like:

Contents of commit messages file:
- Here is the commit message for the ending commit, which is the latest commit (i.e. `HEAD`) by default.
- Here is the commit message for the previous commit (e.g. `HEAD~1`).
- Here is the commit message for the beginning commit, which is the initial commit by default.

My aim with this is to replicate what I'm used to with one of my previous Jenkins setups, where the entire list of commits since the last build was easily visible, and served as a very crude changelog that QA could use to help validate builds. If you're looking for something fancy to intelligently parse commit messages and generate release notes, then look elsewhere!

See Contributing for more information about how this action is setup and how to contribute.

MIT