$CONTRIBUTORS variable takes contributors from a skipped PR

[curquiza]

Hello everyone, thanks for your useful tool!!! 😄
In the meilisearch organization, we use release-drafter with GHA on most of our repositories for a few weeks and we are really satisfied!

I used to skip the PR of Dependabot thanks to the exclude-labels: field. It works perfectly: the PR is indeed not added to the release draft.

But the dependatbot contributor is still there.

Is it possible to include only contributors from non-skipped PR in the $CONTRIBUTOR variable?

FYI, here is my template:

name-template: 'v$RESOLVED_VERSION 🐍'
tag-template: 'v$RESOLVED_VERSION'
exclude-labels:
  - 'skip-changelog'
version-resolver:
  minor:
    labels:
      - 'breaking-change'
  default: patch
categories:
  - title: 'Breaking changes'
    label: 'breaking-change'
template: |
  ## Changes

  $CHANGES

  Thanks again to $CONTRIBUTORS! 🎉
no-changes-template: 'Changes are coming soon 😎'
sort-direction: 'ascending'

Sorry if it's a duplicated issue but I found nothing.

Have a nice day!

[jetersen]

for a quick workaround you could use the replacers to get rid of him 😅

[jetersen]

This regex would mostly do the job: (?:and )?@dependabot-preview(?:\[bot\])?,?

[curquiza]

Hello! @jetersen Thanks for your quick answer.
I tried this, but it does not work. I probably did something wrong.
My template:

name-template: 'v$RESOLVED_VERSION 🐍'
tag-template: 'v$RESOLVED_VERSION'
exclude-labels:
  - 'skip-changelog'
version-resolver:
  minor:
    labels:
      - 'breaking-change'
  default: patch
categories:
  - title: 'Breaking changes'
    label: 'breaking-change'
template: |
  ## Changes

  $CHANGES

  Thanks again to $CONTRIBUTORS! 🎉
no-changes-template: 'Changes are coming soon 😎'
sort-direction: 'ascending'
replacers:
  - search: '(?:and )?@dependabot-preview(?:\[bot\])?,?'
    replace: ''

The result:

[jetersen]

you have to write the full regex so:

replacers:
  - search: '/(?:and )?@dependabot-preview(?:\[bot\])?,?/g'
    replace: ''

[curquiza]

Of course 😅 ! Sorry!
Thanks, it works with your solution! 🎉 !!

[jetersen]

I'll look into fixing permanently

[ThomasKasene]

I was torn between creating a new issue or posting here, but could one solution be to introduce a new configuration property named exclude-authors or exclude-contributors? That way we (as repository owners and developers) can remove ourselves from the contributors list, which I think would be nice.

I've only thought this through for the $CONTRIBUTORS variable, and not the $AUTHOR variable - I'm not sure what I feel about that one yet.

[curquiza]

Hello!
We use the release-drafter at the MeilISearch org in almost all of our repositories!
As you suggested @ThomasKasene, I would rather a exclude-contributors property rather than removing the contributors in the skipped PR from the $CONTRIBUTORS.
The current workaround works, but is not really perfect, there are issues with punctuations. We always have to redo manually the sentence before pushing. Not a big deal, I agree, but I would love to see this feature! 🙂

[ssbarnea]

Regex cleaning approach does not work when the undesired entry is at the end because the sentence will end like ... and. I doubt we can even properly do the cleanup using regexes.

I should also mention that the exclude-contributors does not seem to really work for bots at least. I added pre-commit-ci to the list and I still see two of them listed on the final output, very similar to the reported dependabot issue:

Kudos goes to: @cursedclock, @pre-commit-ci, @pre-commit-ci[bot], @rndmh3ro and @ssbarnea

[ThomasKasene]

I'm not 100% but I don't think exclude-contributors has been released yet(?) As far as I can tell it was just merged with the master branch but nothing else. Correct me if I'm wrong.

[ssbarnea]

That may explain it. It should also be noted that few days ago github updated the way release page displays by automatically creating a "contributors" section with badges of each contributor. You cannot disable this new section thus I fully removed the the similar feature from my release drafter template.

[AetherUnbound]

We're also seeing this as part of our monorepo-based deployment setup (borrowed from #1294) - on releases for a particular app, contributors of all commits (including those skipped) are added to $CONTRIBUTORS.