release-gen

What This Skill Does

The release-gen skill is an intelligent utility designed to automate the often tedious process of versioning and changelog management. By analyzing your project's git commit history since the last release tag, it determines the appropriate semantic version (SemVer) bump—major, minor, or patch—based on the impact of changes. It automatically handles the creation of annotated git tags and updates your project's changelog file, effectively removing the human error and guesswork involved in manual release cycles.

Installation

You can add this skill to your OpenClaw environment by running the following command in your terminal:

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

Ensure your development environment is running Node.js 18 or higher. Because this tool utilizes AI to interpret your commit history, you must have an active OPENAI_API_KEY set as an environment variable in your system configuration.

Use Cases

• Automated CI/CD Workflows: Integrate release-gen into your deployment pipelines to ensure consistent and accurate versioning without manual intervention.
• Open Source Maintenance: Simplify the release process for contributors by automatically generating professional changelogs and determining version bumps based on Conventional Commits.
• Rapid Prototyping: Quickly tag and document changes for projects that require frequent, incremental updates where manual version tracking becomes unmanageable.

Example Prompts

• "@openclaw release-gen, please analyze my recent commits and perform a dry-run to see what the next version bump should be."
• "@openclaw release-gen, I'm ready to ship the latest update; please generate the changelog and create a new git tag."
• "@openclaw release-gen, force a major version bump for this release and update the changelog accordingly."

Tips & Limitations

To get the most accurate results, it is highly recommended to follow the Conventional Commits specification (e.g., using prefixes like feat:, fix:, or including 'BREAKING CHANGE' in the body). Always execute a --dry-run before committing to a permanent tag to verify that the AI's interpretation matches your intent. Note that this tool requires network access to communicate with OpenAI's API and necessitates file-write permissions to update your repository's local files and tags. Only run this tool on stable branches like 'main' or 'master' to avoid polluting your release history with intermediate feature branch tags.