For the one's who already know the tool and wanna get started quickly.
You can get the CLI in the following ways
You can get the binaries from the download section
Using go get
go get -u github.com/barelyhuman/commitlog/v3
curl -sf https://goblin.run/github.com/barelyhuman/commitlog/v3@v3 | sh
Once installed you can just run commitlog generate or the shorter version
commitlog g to get all the changes between the recent tags.
commitlog simply exists because I wasn't able to find a decent enough tool
to do this without being bound to a specific programming language and it's
toolset. The closes one to this is the git's own shortlog and log commands
Language Agnostic - No one needs the entire programming toolset or the language to be setup on the system to be able to just generate logs
Decently Sized - Not everyone has a powerful system and CI systems are still very limited in terms of resources since they give you shared spaces and automating generating this is a common practice so it doesn't make sense for it to install a runtime worth 100MB to run it.
The binary itself is around 10-13MB which is fairly big for a tool like this but this is due to go's nature of embedding the platform runtime with the binary and this might not be ideal for some and so there's another similar smaller scoped version nimclog which is in KB's
Flexible - There are no set standards for how you write commit messages. Commitlint is a good standard and pretty widely used and also what commitlog v1 used as the base for categorizing.
V2 however, doesn't have a set commit category standard, it accepts regex's that you will categorize your commits for you.
This is more for experienced developers who have a their own pattern of writing commits and would like a tool that'd work with their pattern instead of creating friction
Extensible - The entire thing is open source and MIT licenses,
specifically for you to be able to fix and add things as needed. Each command
has been kept away from the domain logic to be able to use commitlog even as
a library and build your own tool if you wish to, though if there's something
you wish the CLI supported, you are free to open issues and I really like
people helping with the development since that helps keeping the tool alive
longer.
The installation is pretty straightforwad. You download the binary from the download section of this website or use something like goblin to build the binary for your specific system (rarely needed) since the releases actually accommodate the most used operating systems and architectures already.
Linux/Mac (Unix Systems)
Once downloaded, you can use the install command on *nix systems to link the
binary to a location that's already in your PATH variable.
eg:
# install commitlog from current directory to the /usr/local/bin directory
install $(pwd)/commitlog /usr/local/bin
This should give you the ability to use the commitlog command anywhere in your
system
Windows
Similar to the linux setup, you can download the .exe file and add it to a
location that your environment path already has. An easier thing to do is to
store the entire thing in your secondary partition and add that location to your
PATH. You can use this resource from Java docs to help you with modifying the
PATH variables
commitlog is MIT Licensed and you can read the entire license in the source code