Set the description for deployments to GitHub releases

[Midnighter]

I didn't see anything in the documentation or examples out on the web about how to actually provide a description for a release deployment. With one of our repositories, we keep markdown files with release notes in a directory so ideally I could copy one of those markdown files (or have its contents copied) to the release description on GitHub.

[BanzaiMan]

What do you mean by "description"? If you mean the "body" of the release (https://developer.github.com/v3/repos/releases/#create-a-release), this is handled in https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/deployment/releases#Advanced-options. We could consider explaining what advanced options are, but at the risk of getting out of sync from time to time.

[Midnighter]

That's exactly what I need! I was browsing the page for any option that looked like it might allow me to pass in a description but I missed the link to the Octokit API. Thank you.

A short description of the possible options probably would have helped me but I understand your concern about getting out of date.

[Midnighter]

Okay, I was a bit too quick to declare success.

I tried three different cases and I'm not quite there yet:

1. When I configure a description directly in the .travis.yml I have no problems and it works:

   body: "a simple description"

2. When I try to do something more complicated with newlines, I get a literal \n in the release.

   body: "a description\non multiple lines"

   You can see the result in my test repo.
3. What I'm really trying to do, though, is to pass in the content of a markdown file.

   export TAG_NOTES=$(cat awesome.md)

   body: $TAG_NOTES

   However, then I get an error with the GitHub API: invalid option "--body=# Header\n\n* Nice list\n\nParagraph 3" as you can see in these logs.

[Midnighter]

Found the following related issue travis-ci/dpl#155 but didn't spot a solution that didn't involve writing my own deploy release script.

[BanzaiMan]

Closing as a duplicate of the dpl issue.