Blog: Improve your changelogs

Improve your changelogs Background Overview of major improvements Example How to write commit messages Manually edit changelog Configuration Changelog for cluster repository Reuse pull requests Custom pipelines Jira as issue tracker More customizations References A standard part of the Jenkins X pipelines since a long time is the execution of jx changelog create that takes the commit messages between the release currently being created and the previous one and creates a change log from these. The change log is then stored as a release note in GitHub or other git provider. jx changelog create During the last year some improvements have landed in various Jenkins X components to improve the changelogs and their usefulness. So I’ll take this opportunity to describe these improvements and also in general give hints to how to get useful changelogs. Changelogs haven’t been very informative with regard to upgrades, ie those applied with jx promote or jx updatebot. One example of this is the release notes of jx after the split out of most functionality to plugins. Lately these have improved due to new functionality to propagate changelogs via pull requests. jx promote jx updatebot One place where changelogs have been completely lacking is in cluster repositories. But using the functionality for propagation of changelogs and some changes in jx boot job you can now a get a changelog for every successful application of changes in a cluster. An example of what this functionality achieves can be seen in a release of jx: https://github. com/jenkins-x/jx/releases/tag/v3.10.81 If you scroll past the boilerplate installation instructions you first see the changelog of jx itself generated from commit messages: https://github. com/jenkins-x/jx/compare/v3.10.80.