Is there a way to automatically update the "Releases" version number on a Github page? Either from automatic machinery within Github, or using some API to update it?
(See the release number "3.5.0" in the image below...) Thanks.
This sidebar component shows you the latest release (I believe). If you want to add a release, that can be done using the REST API. You can also update the release using the REST API.
Note that it isn't sufficient to just push a tag here. A release on GitHub is associated with a tag, but it can also have a message and assets (usually binaries or source code) associated with it. You do need such a tag, but you also need to create the actual release on GitHub.
If you want an example of how this can be done with shell scripting, Git LFS has a script that performs this task as part of the release process.
Related
I'm trying to figure out how to specify "Previous Tag" via queryparams in the release form automation, or via the Create Release API. Preferably Both.
Here is the feature in the UI documented as step 7 here.
If there is no way to do this - where does one request a feature for github? Ex: Is there a github project for github?
Here are the documentation pages for the two ways to do this:
Automation for release forms - there is no "previous_tag" option.
Create a release API - there is no obvious reference to how to specify previous tag, even though there is a way to specify and tell it to generate release notes.
To repeat the question one more time:
How do we specify the specify the prerelease tag for release note autogen? - if unavailable, where does one request a feature for github?
Update:
There is a separate API for generating the release notes, which accepts the previous_tag parameter.
For the querystring, a feature request is open in the github feedback board. Vote for it go give it visbility, hopefully GitHub will take note and implement it.
Original Answer:
It does not look like you can configure it via queryparameters or the API yet. The documentation you shared seems to confirm that.
GitHub has an open discussion board where you can propose features and they have previously shown that they work on topics that resound with the community.
I don't see a fitting category for "Releases" right now, but you can probably fit it into the categories APIs and Integrations or General.
GitHub has a public api that one can access to get current release info, and find the release file (.deb or .tar.gz or .exe, etc) by going to https://api.github.com/repos/[project creator]/[project]/releases/latest
Does GitLab have something similar? I'm working on an automated installer to get certain programs from GitLab that have releases. Using the above api for GitHub, I'm able to get the json info for the current release, and get the url to download the latest release, based on what version I want.
I'm hoping to find something similar in GitLab.
Look no further than GitLab's Release API Docs to start that investigation. It looks quite robust, and I believe you will find it can provide that information.
You can use this API to query for each project, looking for the releases it has. (You could also look for the availability of the project if you are unsure if it is present). Once found, determine the release to retrieve. It's important to note that releases are not always made by a team, so they hopefully are specifically packaging the code into a release for distribution. Additionally, via the API, you can also ensure that the release has specific tags so that if they are using tags, you can focus on specific ones of note, or you can use a more generic approach (e.g. semantic version) to determine which release to retrieve.
Hope that helps. GitLab has a rich API. Take a look.
What is it that Github includes, from the source code or release process, in the email notification for a new release?
This is all I'm seeing:
—
View it on GitHub.
Trying to figure out how to get release notes/changes into the email, automatically.
There are a handful of tools that can be used to generate a CHANGELOG.md - but I was looking for the built-in-to-Github solution. All I could really find was this:
https://github.com/blog/1547-release-your-software
It appears to just use commits since previous tag/release and issues related. It doesn't look like you can provide your own.
I'm also running into an issue associated with creating a tag from a branch, rather than the 'default' - master.
I've found out that in github you can use a Latest Release button or link to always clone the latest tag from that project without specifically specifying the version number, however if I use something like this: (links are just examples project is private)
https://github.com/company/project1/releases/latest (this is how I've learned the latest release link should be accessed)
it just redirects me back to:
https://github.com/company/project1/releases/
My guess is that I have to enable the Latest Release button/tag somehow? How will I do it?
It works only if your release has an artificat associated to it.
See for instance: https://github.com/reactiveui/ReactiveUI/releases/latest
If you define releases without ever attaching a binary to any of them, then 'latest' redirects you to the releases page of your project indeed.
Is there a way to automatically generate a change log from Github issues?
Ideally I want to be able to point at a closed milestone and generate either a plain text list of closed issues with their titles or, even better, a list with markup for links to the issues and the title of the issues themselves.
You can try to use Github-Changelog-Generator. (I'm author of this project)
It generates changelog from tags and merged pull-requests.
This script also have a support of GitHub Issues.
This changelog was generated by this script. CHANGELOG.md
Example:
Changelog
1.2.5 (2015-01-15)
Full Changelog
Implemented enhancements:
Use milestone to specify in which version bug was fixed #22
Fixed bugs:
Error when trying to generate log for repo without tags #32
Merged pull requests:
PrettyPrint class is included using lowercase 'pp' #43 (schwing)
support enterprise github via command line options #42 (glenlovett)
This isn't for Github specifically, but through Git you can run the log through pretty print to generate a changelog style html page.
From https://coderwall.com/p/5cv5lg
git log v2.1.0...v2.1.1 --pretty=format:'<li> view commit • %s</li> ' --reverse | grep "#changelog"
You can use the GitHub API to get a list of issues associated with a given milestone.
For example:
curl https://api.github.com/repos/<user>/<project>/issues\?milestone\=1\&state\=closed
replace <user> and <project> with the username and project and this will return a json list of all closed issues of the milestone with the id 1. You can then, for example, use a script to extract the information you are interested. Here is a python example that prints the list of issues as restructured text:
import json
with open("issues.json") as of:
data = json.load(of)
for issue in data:
t = issue['title']
n = issue['number']
url = issue['html_url']
print "* %s [`Issue %s <%s>`_]" % (t, n, url)
See if the following tool will do for you github-changes.
Disclosure: I'm the author of the tool.
We created an open source project to generate changelog from the list of closed github issues since a given datetime. It's available here: https://github.com/piwik/github-changelog-generator
Not directly through GitHub: that would be a kind of hook that you could put in place, and which would based on naming convention or comment convention that your project might follow.
Even using the issues title isn't always a sure way to generate meaningful change log, unless you review and edit if needed each and every issue title of your project.
In other words, it is very dependent on how you manage your project and not easily generalized to all GitHub repos.
I said as much in a very similar question "Publish a project release (binary/source packages) on Github?".
In addition of a third-party solution (or a GitHub Action like generate-changelog), you might soon Q3 2021, have a native feature from GitHub:
One of the most important parts of the software lifecycle is releasing your code for others to consume.
GitHub Releases will make that even easier by providing compelling and automatic release notes.
When creating a Release, you can click a button to automatically generate release notes.
If you want something more custom, you can a REST API to get the generated release notes and integrate them into your existing releases process.
We also want to ensure that these release notes look amazing when a maintainer shares them and make them easier to discover. We have done a complete redesign of releases to make projects announcements look stunning.
We are surfacing these releases in the feed to increase discovery.
We are also improving the open graph data for releases so they look equally fantastic when shared off of the GitHub platform.
Intended Outcome
Our number one goal is to make it easy for maintainers to create great release notes so more people can discover that amazing work maintainers are doing.
With minimal effort many projects will be able to benefit from detailed release notes.
For maintainers who put more time into their release notes to write editorialized content the intended outcome is that we free up time they are currently spending to maintain custom infrastructure and compile a changelog so they can focus on the most important content for their customers, high quality editorialized content.
Our other goal is to ensure that the release notes look great and are something maintainers and developers are excited to read and share.
How will it work?
The new Releases UI will be able to be enable with feature preview
A new button in the Release creation UI will be able to be pressed to generate release notes from any tag
The generated notes will be able to be configured via a .github/release.yml
A new REST API will allow customers to generate notes at their own convenience to further automate and customize the experience with GitHub actions.
I helped build a jQuery plugin for this recently that uses GitHub issues to communicate app updates directly to the user. The repo can be found here https://github.com/uberVU/github-changelog
Usage is pretty simple:
$(function() {
var $demoChangelog = $('.demo-changelog');
//call the plugin on a dom none
$demoChangelog.changelog({
//give it a repo to monitor
githubRepo: 'uberVU/github-changelog-playground',
});
//manually check for new closed issues
$('.demo-button').on('click', function(e) {
e.stopPropagation();
$demoChangelog.changelog('checkForUpdates');
});
});