generating release notes from Git commits

So you need to generate some release notes and you already have pretty good Git commit messages. Start by adding this little Ruby script to your path as format_release_notes.rb:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

log = ARGF.read

formatted = log.gsub(/commit ([\da-f]{40})\nAuthor: .*\nDate: +.*\n\n {4}(.*)\n(?:\ {4}.*\n)*/, '|\1|\2|')

puts formatted

Then in your .gitconfig add this:

release-notes = "!sh -c 'git log $(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD) --no-merges --not master | format_release_notes.rb' -"

Now you can ask Git for release notes like so:

git release-notes

It will give you the commits in your current branch that are not in master, then format them in a way that's suitable for a Markdown table (minus the header).