When preparing a software release, a common task is to parse the changelog file, and extract the latest changes section from it. For certain purposes, Markdown format is acceptable, but in some cases a text format is also useful.

ChangelogAutomation is a tool for this exact purpose. It will extract the first second-level section from a Markdown file either in a text or in a Markdown format, and will print it to a file or to its stdout.

"Second-level section" is a section preceded by a level 2 header; any of these:

## Level 2 header
…some section content…

Also level 2 header
-------------------
…some section content…

If you use the standalone tool (see below), then ChangelogAutomation will require the .NET 9 dependencies (but not the .NET 9 runtime itself) to be available on the user machine to run. See more information in the documentation.

There's a separate repository with GitHub Action integration of this tool. Check out the documentation.

ChangelogAutomation is available for installation in two variants:

• as a .NET tool:

  $ dotnet tool install --global ChangelogAutomation.Tool

• as a standalone native tool for several operating systems on the GitHub releases page.

Then you can run the tool using:

$ ChangelogAutomation <path-to-input-file> [options…]

This invocation will extract the first second-level section of the file and write it to the output (either the standard output or an optional output file).

The available options are:

• (-o|--output-file-path) <output-file-path> (if not specified, then will print to stdout)
• (-t|--content-type) (Markdown|PlainText): output content type

There's an MSBuild task package available. The package will automatically integrate with dotnet pack, and extract the latest changelog entry into the <releaseNotes> element in the .nuspec file.

Just add a package reference to ChangelogAutomation.MSBuild package, and the task will automatically be enabled. It will set the PackageReleaseNotes property to the latest version section contents (this is a standard property, will then be used by NuGet integration automatically).

There are MSBuild properties to tune its behavior:

• DisableChangelogAutomationTask: set this to true to disable the automatic task invocation (if you want to register it with the custom parameters).
• ChangelogFilePath: point it to the CHANGELOG.md file. By default, will be set to ../CHANGELOG.md (resolved relatively to the project file location).
• ReleaseNotesOutputType: either Markdown or PlainText. If not set, defaults to PlainText.

ChangelogAutomation is a .NET 9 application, so it requires .NET 9 SDK (or a later version) for build.

To build the application, run the following command:

$ dotnet build --configuration Release

To run the unit test suite, run the following command:

$ dotnet test --configuration Release

To run the integration test for the MSBuild task package, run the following command:

$ pwsh ./ChangelogAutomation.MSBuild.Tests/Run-Test.ps1

To verify the NuGet package produced for ChangelogAutomation.MSBuild, run the following command:

$ pwsh ./ChangelogAutomation.MSBuild.Tests/Run-PackageValidation.ps1

To run the developer version, execute the following command (usual application arguments follow after --):

$ dotnet run --project ChangelogAutomation -- …

• Changelog
• Contributor Guide
• Maintainership

The project is distributed under the terms of the MIT license.

The license indication in the project's sources is compliant with the REUSE specification v3.3.