Automatically add the changes from each PR to the release notes in a file.

Install this GitHub action by creating a file in your repo at .github/workflows/latest-changes.yml.

A minimal example could be:

name: Latest Changes

on:
  pull_request_target:
    branches:
      - main
      # Or use the branch "master" if that's your main branch:
      # - master
    types:
      - closed
  # For manually triggering it
  workflow_dispatch:
    inputs:
      number:
        description: PR number
        required: true

jobs:
  latest-changes:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: docker://tiangolo/latest-changes:0.2.1
        with:
          token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

Note: you can also use the GitHub action directly instead of with Docker, but that would take an extra minute:

      # - uses: docker://tiangolo/latest-changes:0.2.1
      # This is slower but also works
      - uses: tiangolo/latest-changes@0.2.1

In this minimal example, it uses all the default configurations.

After merging a PR to the main branch, it will:

• Find a file README.md
• Inside of that file, find a "header" with the text:

### Latest Changes

• Right after that, it will add a new list item with the changes:
  • Using the title from the PR.
    • Tip: make sure the PR has the title you want before merging it.
  • Including the PR number, with a link to the PR itself.
  • Including the PR author, with a link as well.

It will look something like:

Latest Changes

• ✨ Add support for Jinja2 templates for latest changes messages. PR #23 by @tiangolo.

You can see an example of how it works in this same file, at the bottom, in Latest Changes - Latest Changes 🤷.

• Then it will commit the changes, and push them to your repo. 🚀

As the changes are simply written to a file in your repo, you can later tweak them however you want. You can add links, extend the information, remove irrelevant changes, etc. ✨

You can also use labels in the PRs to configure which sections they should show up in the release notes.

By default, it will use these labels and headers:

• breaking: Breaking Changes
• security: Security Fixes
• feature: Features
• bug: Fixes
• refactor: Refactors
• upgrade: Upgrades
• docs: Docs
• lang-all: Translations
• internal: Internal

So, if you have a PR with a label feature, by default, it will show up in the section about features, like:

Latest Changes

Features

• ✨ Add support for Jinja2 templates for latest changes messages. PR #23 by @tiangolo.

You can configure the labels and headers used in the GitHub Action labels workflow configuration, and you can configure the header prefix, by default #### .

Read more about it in the section about configuration.

For this GitHub Action to work automatically, the workflow file has to be in the repository before the PR is created, so that the PR also includes it. That's just how GitHub Actions work.

Nevertheless, if you have some PRs that were open before adding this GitHub Action to your project and you still want to use it, you can create workflows manually. It will take the PR number, and then it will do the rest automatically.

You can "dispatch" a workflow/run from the "Actions" tab:

• Select this GitHub Action with the name you used, e.g. "Latest Changes".
• Click on "Run Workflow".
• It will ask you for the PR number and do all the rest.

So, in those cases, it won't do everything automatically, you will have to manually start it and set the PR number. But it can still save you from most of the work, and from a bunch of human errors. 🤓 🎉

You can configure:

• latest_changes_file: The file to modify with the latest changes. For example: ./docs/latest-changes.rst.
• latest_changes_header: The header to look for before adding a new message. for example: # CHANGELOG.
• template_file: A custom Jinja2 template file to use to generate the message, you could use this to generate a different message or to use a different format, for example, HTML instead of the default Markdown.
• end_regex: A RegEx string that marks the end of this release, so it normally matches the start of the header of the next release section, normally the same header level as latest_changes_header, so, if the latest_changes_header is ### Latest Changes, the content for the next release below is probably something like ### 0.2.0, then the end_regex should be ^### . This is used to limit the content updated as this will read the existing sub sections and possibly update them using the labels configuration and the labels in the PR. By default it is (^### .*)|(^## .*) to detect a possible next header, e.g. for the license.
• debug_logs: Set to 'true' to show logs with the current settings.
• labels: A JSON array of JSON objects with a label that you would put in each PR and the header that would be used in the release notes. See the example below.
• label_header_prefix: A prefix to put before each label's header. This is also used to detect where the next label header starts. By default it is #### , so the headers will look like #### Features.

The labels configuration takes a JSON array of JSON objects that contain a key label with the label you would add to each PR, and a key header with the header text that should be added to the release notes for that label.

The order is important, the first label from the list that is found in your PR is the one that will be used. So, if you have a PR that has both labels feature and bug, if you use the default configuration, it will show up in the section for features, as that comes first. If you want it to show up in the section for bugs you would need to change the order of the list of this configuration to have bug first.

Note that this JSON has to be passed as a string because that's the only thing that GitHub Actions support for configurations.

If you want to keep the same default labels but change the header level, so, add or remove hash symbols, you can set the label_header_prefix configuration. You could also use it to set a different header prefix, but the common case is changing the section header level.

A full example, using all the configurations, could be as follows.

You could have a custom Jinja2 template with the message to write at ./.github/workflows/release-notes.jinja2 containing:

This changed: {{pr.title}}. Done by [the GitHub user {{pr.user.login}}]({{pr.user.html_url}}). Check the [Pull Request {{pr.number}} with the changes and stuff]({{pr.html_url}}). now back to code. 🤓

Note: you can use any location in your repository for the Jinja2 template.

Tip: The pr object is a PyGitHub PullRequest object, you can extract any other information you need from it.

Then you could have a workflow like:

name: Latest Changes

on:
  pull_request_target:
    branches:
      - master
    types:
      - closed
  workflow_dispatch:
    inputs:
      number:
        description: PR number
        required: true

jobs:
  latest-changes:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v2
    - uses: tiangolo/latest-changes@0.2.1
      with:
        token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
        latest_changes_file: docs/release-notes.md
        latest_changes_header: '# Release Notes'
        template_file: ./.github/workflows/release-notes.jinja2
        # The next release will start with this RegEx, for example "## 0.2.0"
        end_regex: '^## '
        debug_logs: true
        # Here we use a yaml multiline string to pass a JSON array of JSON objects in a more readable way
        # In these case we use the same default labels and the same header titles, but the headers use 3 hash symbols instead of the default of 4
        # We also add a custom last label "egg" for PRs with easter eggs.
        labels: >
          [
            {"label": "breaking", "header": "Breaking Changes"},
            {"label": "security", "header": "Security Fixes"},
            {"label": "feature", "header": "Features"},
            {"label": "bug", "header": "Fixes"},
            {"label": "refactor", "header": "Refactors"},
            {"label": "upgrade", "header": "Upgrades"},
            {"label": "docs", "header": "Docs"},
            {"label": "lang-all", "header": "Translations"},
            {"label": "internal", "header": "Internal"},
            {"label": "egg", "header": "Easter Eggs"}
          ]
        # This will be added to the start of each label's header and
        # will be used to detect existing label headers
        label_header_prefix: '### '

In this custom config:

• The main branch is master instead of main.
• It uses the GitHub action directly:

tiangolo/latest-changes@0.2.1

instead of with Docker:

docker://tiangolo/latest-changes:0.2.1

Note: that would make every run about 1 min slower, but you can do that if you prefer it 🤷.

• It modifies the file docs/release-notes.md instead of the default README.md.
• It looks for a header in that file with:

# Release Notes

Note: The latest_changes_header is a regular expression.

So it will generate messages like:

# Release Notes

* This changed: ✨ Add support for Jinja2 templates for changes notes. Done by [the GitHub user tiangolo](https://github.com/tiangolo). Check the [Pull Request 23 with the changes and stuff](https://github.com/tiangolo/latest-changes/pull/23). now back to code. 🤓

And that Markdown will be shown like:

Release Notes

• This changed: ✨ Add support for Jinja2 templates for changes notes. Done by the GitHub user tiangolo. Check the Pull Request 23 with the changes and stuff. now back to code. 🤓

• It will expect that the end of the content starts with the regular expression ^## , normally because that's how the next release starts. This will be used to organize the content in the sections with the headers from the labels configuration.

• It will show a lot of debugging information.

• It will use the same default labels and headers plus another one for easter eggs.

• It will show those section headers from labels with 3 hash symbols instead of the default of 4. And it will also find any existing header checking for that prefix (it will use a regular expression like ^### ).

If you have a protected branch (for example main or master), this action wouldn't be able to write and push the updated latest changes to it.

But it's easy to fix if you are an admin in the repo and can push directly to the protected branch.

You need to create a new GitHub access token. For example, a personal access token. You will probably need to give it repo permissions.

Then, in your repository, go to "Settings" -> "Secrets", and create a new "repository secret". Use the access token as the value, and for the name, it could be something like ACTIONS_TOKEN. Just remember to use the same name in the configurations shown below.

Then in your configuration, pass that token to the action actions/checkout@v4:

      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          token: ${{ secrets.ACTIONS_TOKEN }}

Note: you pass that token to the official actions/checkout@v4, not to this latest-changes action.

The complete example would look like:

name: Latest Changes

on:
  pull_request_target:
    branches:
      - main
      # Or use the branch "master" if that's your main branch:
      # - master
    types:
      - closed
  # For manually triggering it
  workflow_dispatch:
    inputs:
      number:
        description: PR number
        required: true

jobs:
  latest-changes:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          token: ${{ secrets.ACTIONS_TOKEN }}
      - uses: docker://tiangolo/latest-changes:0.2.1
        with:
          token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

By passing the custom access token to the action actions/checkout@v4, this action will configure git with those credentials.

And then when latest-changes runs and executes some commands with git, including git push, they will be done with your access token.

Your access token will be used to push the changes, but don't worry, the commits will not be associated with your personal user account.

latest-changes still configures the git user with:

• username: github-actions
• email: github-actions@github.com

So, the commits will still be shown as made by github-actions.

• ✨ Add retries to handle race conditions. PR #63 by @tiangolo.

• 🐛 Detect if there's a second level header after the release content, to support the first change in a README with a last section for a license. PR #59 by @tiangolo.

• ♻️ Separate label header prefix from label text with label_header_prefix, this allows re-using the default labels while only changing the header level. PR #58 by @tiangolo.

• 🐛 Fix handling multiple section headers. PR #57 by @tiangolo.

• ⬆ Update httpx requirement from <0.16.0,>=0.15.5 to >=0.15.5,<0.26.0. PR #54 by @dependabot[bot].

• ✏️ Fix typo in syntax for using the GitHub Action tag directly (instead of with Docker) in README. PR #39 by @art049.

• ⬆ Bump docker/setup-buildx-action from 1 to 3. PR #53 by @dependabot[bot].
• ⬆ Bump docker/build-push-action from 2 to 5. PR #52 by @dependabot[bot].
• ⬆ Bump docker/login-action from 1 to 3. PR #51 by @dependabot[bot].

• ♻️ Use Docker slim to reduce the time to run in half, from 33s to 16s. PR #55 by @tiangolo.
• ✨ Add support for labels and section headers (features, fixes, etc.). PR #48 by @tiangolo.
• 🚀 Publish amd64 and arm64 versions, and publish to GitHub Container Registry, fix git in containers. PR #46 by @tiangolo.

• ⬆️ Upgrade GitHub Action checkout and references to it. PR #49 by @tiangolo.

• 📝 Add docs for using latest-changes with protected branches. PR #43 by @tiangolo.

• 👷 Do not push the slim branch for debugging. PR #56 by @tiangolo.
• 👷 Update CI, Dependabot, funding. PR #50 by @tiangolo.
• 🔥 Remove config pushing to custom branch for debugging. PR #47 by @tiangolo.

• 👷 Update CI, Dependabot, funding. PR #50 by @tiangolo.

• 🚚 Update Python module name to latest_changes to avoid conflicts with any repo directory "app". PR #37 by @tiangolo.
• 🐛 Fix default Jinja2 path in Action yaml. PR #38 by @tiangolo.

• ✨ Check if the latest changes message was already added before adding it. PR #35 by @tiangolo.
• 📝 Add docs for running manually, with a workflow dispatch. PR #34 by @tiangolo.
• ✨ Refactor and add support for triggering with workflow dispatch events. PR #32 by @tiangolo.
• 🐛 Fix basic example in README, include checkout step. PR #31 by @tiangolo.

• 📝 Add note about updating the PR title. PR #30 by @tiangolo.
• 🐛 Fix internal latest changes, use a custom header so it doesn't break the examples. PR #29 by @tiangolo.
• 🐛 Fix default action config for template file. PR #28 by @tiangolo.
• ✨ Add support for Jinja2 templates for changes notes. PR #23 by @tiangolo.
• 🔥 Remove unnecessary note from release notes. PR #22 by @tiangolo.
• 🔥 Remove unnecessary note from latest changes. PR #21 by @tiangolo.
• 🔧 Update tmate config keys. PR #20 by @tiangolo.
• 🔒 Update tmate config for keys. PR #19 by @tiangolo.
• ✏️ Fix incorrect URL. PR #18 by @tiangolo.
• 🔒 Try to secure tmate. PR #17 by @tiangolo.
• 📝 Update release notes URLs. PR #16 by @tiangolo.

This project is licensed under the terms of the MIT license.