changelog-gen

What This Skill Does

The changelog-gen skill is an automated release documentation tool designed to streamline the software development lifecycle by extracting, categorizing, and formatting git commit history into a professional 'Keep a Changelog' compliant markdown document. By leveraging GPT-4o-mini, it processes raw commit messages and transforms them into clean, human-readable entries categorized under common headers such as Added, Changed, Fixed, and Removed. It eliminates the tedious manual effort typically required to compile release notes, ensuring your documentation remains consistent and accurate relative to your codebase evolution.

Installation

To integrate this skill into your OpenClaw environment, execute the following command in your terminal:

clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/lxgicstudios/changelog-gen

Ensure that you have Node.js version 18 or higher installed on your system. Additionally, you must have an active OPENAI_API_KEY set in your environment variables, as the tool relies on LLM analysis to interpret and categorize your commit history correctly.

Use Cases

This skill is perfect for developers, maintainers, and DevOps engineers who prioritize clean documentation. Key use cases include:

• Automating release notes generation for GitHub or GitLab releases.
• Catching up on documentation for projects where changelog maintenance has been neglected.
• Maintaining standardized formatting across large-scale repositories with multiple contributors.
• Quickly preparing summaries for stakeholders after a sprint or milestone completion.

Example Prompts

• "Generate a changelog for the transition between version v1.2.0 and the current HEAD state."
• "Create a new CHANGELOG.md file by analyzing all commits between tags v0.9.0 and v1.0.0."
• "Extract the release notes for the current development branch since the last release and save them to a file named RELEASES.md."

Tips & Limitations

The quality of the generated changelog is directly proportional to the quality of your commit history; descriptive, atomic commit messages will yield significantly better results than vague ones. While the AI is excellent at categorization, you should always review the generated output before publishing to ensure that breaking changes or sensitive updates are highlighted appropriately. Keep in mind that this tool performs a live query of your git logs, so ensure your local git environment is up to date before execution. Use the --help flag for a comprehensive list of CLI arguments and customization options.