Changelog Create extension for Visual Studio Code

This extension helps developers make easy notes on changes made to their codebase.

🌱 Introduction

This is the Visual Studio Code alternative to a Visual Studio extension developed for the convenience of creating special change files that are used to manage a changelog.

What are the change files? 🤔

Change files are just files located in the changes directory with the following naming scheme:

<change_type> [<change_category>] <change_description>

Acceptable entries for the <change_type> are:

• Added
• Changed
• Deprecated
• Removed
• Fixed
• Security

This decision was inspired by following the principles for keeping a good changelog.

To avoid incorrect file naming and to ease file creation process on the developer, this extension was made for Visual Studio Code alongside our other helpers:

• Visual Studio extension
• CLI helper

These files are then used with our Changelog Manager tool to compile changes and insert a new changelog sections and thus versioning the application.

For the convenience of using this tool to manage a changelog in an automated CI/CD environment we made a GitHub Action and an Azure DevOps extension.

We highly recommend that you read up on how and what exactly is it doing behind the scenes, as well as, learn how to use the .changelog.json configuration file to customize the tool's behaviour.

📖 Table of contents

• 🌱 Introduction
• 🛠️ Prerequisites
• 💻 Installation
• 📝 Usage
• ⚙️ Configuration file
• 🏗 Development
• ☎️ Support
• 🪪 License

🛠 Prerequisities

Simple, just Visual Studio Code editor 🎉

💻 Installation

You can get the extension either by downloading and installing it manually from Visual Studio Code Marketplace or by searching for it in the Visual Studio Code Extension Manager.

📝 Usage

You can trigger the extension by using the ALT + C shortcut or by using the command palette (Ctrl + Shift + P) and searching for the command

In the first step, user will be prompted to choose a type of the change he is documenting

Based on the users workspace one of the two things will happen next:

• If there are more than 1 workspaces open in the editor, user will be asked to choose a workspace he would like to create a change file for

  

• If the user has only 1 workspace open, the extension will take the current workspace folder as the working directory and proceed to the next step

In the next step, one of the two things will happen next depending on if the user has defined a .changelog.json configuration file:

• If the .changelog.json exists with the categories listed inside, the user will be asked to choose one of the categories for the change

  

• If the .changelog.json does not exist or there are no explicit categories defined inside

  • input can be any empty value and all excess whitespace will be removed

  

And in the final step, the user is prompted for a change description which is validated for empty and whitespace input

And that's it! You should now have a new file created inside the changes folder in your workspace directory! 🎉

You can now let this folder accumulate change entries which will be bundled up into your CHANGELOG.md when you want to create a new application release using our Changelog Manager tool or one of our CI/CD tasks mentioned in the introduction section.

⚙ Configuration file

.changelog.json is an optional JSON file. It specifies which change categories are allowed in your project. File needs to be located in the same directory alongside the appropriate CHANGELOG.md file.

If we wanted to allow only 3 different change categories: API, FE (Frontend) and BE (Backend), the configuration would look like:

{
  "categories": [
    "API",
    "FE",
    "BE"
  ]
}

If the configuration exists, user will be able to choose only one of the categories provided as the change category. On the other hand, if the configuration file does not exist or the categories list is empty, user will be shown a text input and everything will be able to qualify as the change category.

For more features that can be configured using the configuration file, see the Changelog Manager's README.

🏗 Development

This action uses Yarn v1 as its package manager, so in order to get quickly up and developing you will need to have it installed on your machine.

If you don't already have it, you can easily install it by using the following command (assuming you have Node.js installed)

npm install --global yarn

Now you can install dependencies using the following command

yarn install

Available commands

☎ Support

If you are having problems, please let us know by raising a new issue.

🪪 License

This project is licensed with the MIT License.