Help making a release note generator for artifacthub.io

[halkeye]

Hey Everyone.

I'm looking at automating my releases of helm charts. I'm using https://www.npmjs.com/package/semantic-release-helm3 successfully right now to update the appropriate files, but I want to mix in release notes.

The snag is artifacthub.io has a pretty specific changelog format. It essentially needs an array of entries yaml stringified. I'm struggling to think of a solution because the output of @semantic-release/release-notes-generator produces a string, so I can't modify it after the fact.

changelog: |-
 - "foo"
 - "bar"

I'm trying to avoid writing my own git parser like release-notes-generator does, and just take advantage of the parts that already exist. I think this might be a bad way to handle it, and i suspect release notes generator is pretty stable and I can just fork it.

For now I've gotten something like:

    const yaml = require('js-yaml');
    const generator = require("@semantic-release/release-notes-generator");
    const Handlebars = require('handlebars')
    Handlebars.registerHelper("yamlString", function (options) {
        const input = options.fn(this).trim()
        context.logger.log('yamlString: %o', input);
        return yaml.dump(input.replace(/^\s*\*\s*/g, '').trim(), {lineWith: 999, forceQuotes: true});
    });
    let notes = await generator.generateNotes({
        writerOpts: {
            mainTemplate: "{{#each commitGroups}}{{#each commits}} - {{#yamlString}}{{> commit root=@root}}{{/yamlString}}{{/each}}{{/each}}",
        }
    }, context);
    context.logger.log('done.notes: %o', notes);
    context.nextRelease.notes = yaml.dump(yaml.load(notes), {
        lineWith: 999,
        forceQuotes: true,
        quotingType: '"',
    });
    context.logger.log('yaml.notes: %o', notes);
    context.logger.log('generateNotes.context.nextRelease: %o', context.nextRelease)
}

Which calls release notes generator with a new main template, but wrapped in a handlebars helper. It'll in this case because there's never going to be another version of handlebars (helm are not javascript projects), but it feels wrong in every way.

Another option might be feeding it through a markdown parser, buti 'm not sure that is better.
Does anyone have any suggestions on alternative ways of doing it?