This is a really simple script but first I want to say that I have seen 20+ scripts which do the exact same thing but have 150+ lines of code. I've seen this in nodejs, ruby & even python.

Personally I think that says a lot about the current state of 'coders' / 'developers'.

In the various examples I found people were writing functions just to remove whitespace, functions with supposed 'options' & multiple regex queries for formatting. They also added in a nice "this was generated using xxx" at the top of the changelog.md. There was a python one with a suggestion of putting the script in the base directory of the project (never heard of $path or aliases?), this one did import subprocess & spawn multiple processes tho so I shouldn't be surprised.

Just STOP....

What we want to do: have a list of changes to add in markdown from git (very VERY simple)

After looking at the git log documentation I decided to use RFC2822 style for date & --pretty as it gives some options for formatting. On running the script you get empty newlines (oh noes, must regex in python/ruby/nodejs as we've never used cli before) but that is sorted easily with sed.

One line script to output our changelog:

git log --pretty=format:"* %aD %s  %n%b" --date=short | sed '/^\s*$/d'

example (4 lines from my linux repo on github)

* Thu, 4 Jun 2015 22:22:08 +0100 updated README - new custom kernel etc
* Sun, 24 May 2015 22:11:25 +0100 added more firefox about:config tweaks
* Thu, 21 May 2015 16:15:33 +0100 switched to firefox aurora / dev
* Tue, 19 May 2015 18:04:41 +0100 new firefox scripts added

But we want to make a changelog.md? Simple enough to put into a file with > ... ?

git log --pretty=format:"* %aD %s  %n%b" --date=short | sed '/^\s*$/d' > changelog.md

That's it really. You can now add an alias in your profile/bash/zsh/whatever rc file or you can create a script which is in $PATH to have it global.