Drafts your next release notes as pull requests are merged into master. Built with Probot.

You can use the Release Drafter GitHub Action in a GitHub Actions Workflow by configuring a YAML-based workflow file, e.g. .github/workflows/release-drafter.yml, with the following:

name: Release Drafter

on:
  push:
    # branches to consider in the event; optional, defaults to all
    branches:
      - master

jobs:
  update_release_draft:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      # Drafts your next Release notes as Pull Requests are merged into "master"
      - uses: toolmantim/release-drafter@v5.2.0
        env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

You can also install the Release Drafter GitHub App, choosing the repositories for which you want releases automatically created.

Once you’ve added Release Drafter to your repository, it must be enabled by adding a .github/release-drafter.yml configuration file to each repository.

For example, take the following .github/release-drafter.yml file in a repository:

template: |
  ## What’s Changed

  $CHANGES

As pull requests are merged, a draft release is kept up-to-date listing the changes, ready to publish when you’re ready:

The following is a more complicated configuration, which categorises the changes into headings, and automatically suggests the next version number:

name-template: 'v$NEXT_PATCH_VERSION 🌈'
tag-template: 'v$NEXT_PATCH_VERSION'
categories:
  - title: '🚀 Features'
    labels:
      - 'feature'
      - 'enhancement'
  - title: '🐛 Bug Fixes'
    labels:
      - 'fix'
      - 'bugfix'
      - 'bug'
  - title: '🧰 Maintenance'
    label: 'chore'
change-template: '- $TITLE @$AUTHOR (#$NUMBER)'
template: |
  ## Changes

  $CHANGES

You can configure Release Drafter using the following key in your .github/release-drafter.yml file:

Release Drafter also supports Probot Config, if you want to store your configuration files in a central repository. This allows you to share configurations between projects, and create a organization-wide configuration file by creating a repository named .github with the file .github/release-drafter.yml.

You can use any of the following variables in your template:

You can use any of the following variables in your template, name-template and tag-template:

You can use any of the following variables in version-template to format the $NEXT_{PATCH,MINOR,MAJOR}_VERSION variables:

You can use any of the following variables in change-template:

With the categories option you can categorize pull requests in release notes using labels. For example, append the following to your .github/release-drafter.yml file:

categories:
  - title: '🚀 Features'
    label: 'feature'
  - title: '🐛 Bug Fixes'
    labels:
      - 'fix'
      - 'bugfix'
      - 'bug'

Pull requests with the label "feature" or "fix" will now be grouped together:

Adding such labels to your PRs can be automated by using PR Labeler or Probot Auto Labeler.

With the exclude-labels option you can exclude pull requests from the release notes using labels. For example, append the following to your .github/release-drafter.yml file:

exclude-labels:
  - 'skip-changelog'

Pull requests with the label "skip-changelog" will now be excluded from the release draft.

You can search and replace content in the generated changelog body, using regular expressions, with the replacers option. Each replacer is applied in order.

replacers:
  - search: '/CVE-(\d{4})-(\d+)/g'
    replace: 'https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-$1-$2'
  - search: 'myname'
    replace: 'My Name'

If your project doesn't follow Semantic Versioning you can still use Release Drafter, but you may want to set the version-template option to customize how the $NEXT_{PATCH,MINOR,MAJOR}_VERSION environment variables are generated.

For example, if your project doesn't use patch version numbers, you can set version-template to $MAJOR.$MINOR. If the current release is version 1.0, then $NEXT_MINOR_VERSION will be 1.1.

Release Drafter requires full write, because GitHub does not offer a limited scope for only writing releases. Don't install Release Drafter to your entire GitHub account — only add the repositories you want to draft releases on.

If you have Node v10+ installed locally, you can run the tests, and a local app, using the following commands:

# Install dependencies
yarn

# Run the tests
npm test

# Run the app locally
npm run dev

Once you've started the app, visit localhost:3000 and you'll get step-by-step instructions for installing it in your GitHub account so you can start pushing commits and testing it locally.

If you don’t have Node installed, you can use Docker Compose:

# Run the tests
docker-compose run --rm app npm test

Third-party contributions are welcome! 🙏🏼 See CONTRIBUTING.md for step-by-step instructions.

If you need help or have a question, let me know via a GitHub issue.

If you want to deploy your own copy of Release Drafter, follow the Probot Deployment Guide.

Run the following command:

git checkout master && git pull && npm version [major | minor | patch]

The command does the following:

• Ensures you’re on master and don’t have local, un-commited changes
• Bumps the version number in package.json based on major, minor or patch
• Runs the postversion npm script in package.json, which:
  • Pushes the tag to GitHub
  • Publishes the npm release
  • Deploys to Now
  • Opens the GitHub releases page so you can publish the release notes