Generate Release Notes

Using Automatic Release Note Generation

The github_release_notes task fetches the text from Pull Requests that were merged between two given tags. The task then searches for specific titles (Critical Changes, Changes, Issues Closed, New Metadata, Installation Info, and so on) in the Pull Request bodies, and aggregates the text together under those titles in the GitHub tag description.

github_release_notes is automatically run during CumulusCI’s built-in release flows.

To see what the release notes look like without publishing them to GitHub:

$ cci task run github_release_notes --tag release/1.2

Note

The --tag option indicates which release’s change notes are aggregated. The previous command aggregates all change notes between the [1.2]{.title-ref} release and the [1.1]{.title-ref} release.

To see where each line in the release notes comes from, use the --link_pr True option.

$ cci task run github_release_notes --tag release/1.2 --link_pr True

To publish the release notes to a release tag in GitHub, use the --publish True option:

$ cci task run github_release_notes --tag release/1.2 --publish True

To use additional headings, add new ones (as parsers) under the project__git__release_notes section of the cumulusci.yml file.

release_notes:
    parsers:
        7: class_path: cumulusci.tasks.release_notes.parser.GithubLinesParser

Note

The new parser is listed with the number 7 because the first six are the default parsers that come with CumulusCI.

Using Static Release Notes

In some cases, you may wish to use static text as your release notes instead of aggregating them from Pull Request content. You can do that by making customizations in your cumulusci.yml.

Customize the github_release task to include your static content:

tasks:
    github_release:
        options:
            release_content: |
                # This is my top-level heading

                Here is some body content.

Note that you may use Markdown, provided you indent the content as shown and utilize the | indicator, which marks a YAML block.

Then, turn off the github_release_notes task, where you don’t want it to run:

flows:
    release_beta:
        steps:
            3:
                task: None

You can repeat this configuration for any or all of the flows release_beta, release_production, release_2gp_beta, release_2gp_production, release_unlocked_beta, and release_unlocked_production. You may choose to customize only the production flows if you want to use auto-generated release notes for your beta releases.