A GitHub Action triggered by a new tag getting pushed. It then fetches all the commits since the previous tag and creates a changelog text using the Conventional Commits format. It will also turn PR numbers into clickable links.

This action returns the generated changelog text, but doesn't do anything more; you need to for example prepend it to a CHANGELOG.md file, create a GitHub Release with this text, etc. A full example doing all these things is given below.

name: Create Release

on:
  push:
    tags:
      - '*'

jobs:
  create-release:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v2

      - name: Create changelog text
        id: changelog
        uses: loopwerk/conventional-changelog-action@main
        with:
          token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          exclude: other,doc,chore

      - name: Create release
        uses: actions/create-release@latest
        env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
        with:
          tag_name: ${{ github.ref }}
          release_name: Release ${{ github.ref }}
          body: ${{ steps.changelog.outputs.changes }}

      - name: Read CHANGELOG.md
        id: readfile
        uses: juliangruber/read-file-action@v1
        with:
          path: ./CHANGELOG.md

      - name: Write to CHANGELOG.md
        uses: DamianReeves/write-file-action@master
        with:
          path: ./CHANGELOG.md
          contents: ${{ steps.changelog.outputs.changelog }}${{ steps.readfile.outputs.content }}
          write-mode: overwrite

      - name: Commit and push CHANGELOG.md
        uses: EndBug/add-and-commit@v7
        with:
          add: CHANGELOG.md
          message: "chore: Update CHANGELOG.md"
          branch: main

• token: Your GitHub token, ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}. Required.
• exclude: A comma separated list of commits types you want to exclude from the changelog. Optional.

• changelog: Generated changelog for the latest tag.
• changes: Generated changelog for the latest tag, without the version/date header.

This action is very simple, and not very configurable yet.

• It would be nice to be able to supply a changelog message template instead of having a hardcoded template in the action itself.
• The mapping from raw type (like feat) to changelog header (like New Features) would also be good to have configurable.
• Mentioning the author of a PR within the changelog would be good.
• Display breaking changes notes.

Thanks to Helmisek/conventional-changelog-generator and ardalanamini/auto-changelog for inspiration. Thanks to nektos/act for making it possible to run GitHub Actions locally, making development and testing a whole lot easier.