Drafts your next release notes as pull requests are merged into master.

Usage

You can use the Release Drafter GitHub Action in a GitHub Actions Workflow by configuring a YAML-based workflow file, e.g. .github/workflows/release-drafter.yml, with the following:

name: Release Drafter

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
      - master

# Permissions for default token (secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN)
permissions:
  contents: write
  pull-requests: read

jobs:
  update_release_draft:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: release-drafter/release-drafter@v7
        with:
          config-name: release-drafter.yml # the default, loads '.github/release-drafter.yml'

Configuration

The action requires a configuration file. Default location is .github/release-drafter.yml, and will be fetched using octokit behind the scenes. You do not need to checkout your repository beforehand.

Example

For example, take the following .github/release-drafter.yml file in a repository:

template: |
  ## What’s Changed

  $CHANGES

As pull requests are merged, a draft release is kept up-to-date listing the changes, ready to publish when you’re ready:

The following is a more complicated configuration, which categorises the changes into headings, and automatically suggests the next version number:

name-template: "v$RESOLVED_VERSION 🌈"
tag-template: "v$RESOLVED_VERSION"
categories:
  - title: "🚀 Features"
    semver-increment: minor
    when:
      labels:
        - "feature"
        - "enhancement"
  - title: "🐛 Bug Fixes"
    when:
      labels:
        - "fix"
        - "bugfix"
        - "bug"
  - title: "🧰 Maintenance"
    when:
      label: "chore"
  - type: "pre-exclude"
    when:
      label: "skip-changelog"
  - type: "version-resolver"
    semver-increment: "major"
    when:
      label: "major"
  - type: "version-resolver"
    semver-increment: "patch"
change-template: "- $TITLE @$AUTHOR (#$NUMBER)"
change-title-escapes: '\<*_&' # You can add # and @ to disable mentions, and add ` to disable code blocks.
template: |
  ## Changes

  $CHANGES

Configuration Options

You can configure Release Drafter using the following key in your .github/release-drafter.yml file:

Template Variables

You can use any of the following variables in your template, header and footer:

Category Template Variables

You can use any of the following variables in category-template:

Next Version Variables

You can use any of the following variables in your template, header, footer, name-template and tag-template:

Next Version Component Helpers

For each of the $NEXT_{MAJOR,MINOR,PATCH}_VERSION variables, additional component helper variables are available that extract individual version components:

Version Template Variables

You can use any of the following variables in version-template to format the Next Version Variables:

You may want to use this when producing non semver output.

version-template: "ver $MAJOR"

semver.coerce("ver 1", true); // { version: '1.0.0' }

Version Resolver

Any category with semver-increment contributes to $RESOLVED_VERSION. Use type: version-resolver categories when you want version resolution rules that do not also render a changelog section.

Before version resolution runs, any pre-include and pre-exclude categories filter the candidate pull requests. After that:

• type: changelog categories contribute only for pull requests that end up assigned to that changelog category
• type: version-resolver categories contribute from their own matches without rendering a changelog section
• the highest matching increment wins across both category types

Category order matters when exclusive: true is used. Exclusivity is evaluated independently for changelog categories and version-resolver categories.

categories:
  - type: "version-resolver"
    semver-increment: "major"
    when:
      label: "major"
  - type: "version-resolver"
    semver-increment: "minor"
    when:
      label: "minor"
  - type: "version-resolver"
    semver-increment: "patch"
    when:
      label: "patch"
  - type: "version-resolver"
    semver-increment: "patch"

The example above:

• uses matching categories to resolve major, minor, or patch
• uses the category with no when as the fallback when nothing else matches
• picks the highest semver increment across matching categories

Change Template Variables

You can use any of the following variables in change-template:

References

Note: This is only relevant for GitHub app users as references is ignored when running as GitHub action due to GitHub workflows more powerful on conditions

References takes an list and accepts strings and regex. If none are specified, we default to the repository’s default branch usually master.

references:
  - master
  - v.+

Currently matching against any ref/heads/ and ref/tags/ references behind the scene

Categorize Changes

With the categories option you can describe the full change classification pipeline:

• type: changelog groups matching changes in the rendered release notes
• type: pre-include keeps only matching changes for later processing
• type: pre-exclude removes matching changes before changelog generation
• type: version-resolver affects $RESOLVED_VERSION without rendering a changelog section

pre-include always runs before pre-exclude, and both category types affect both changelog generation and version resolution.

Categories are evaluated in the order they are defined. By default, a pull request can match multiple categories of the same type. Setting exclusive: true on a changelog or version-resolver category stops later categories of that same type from also matching the same pull request.

Each category supports the following keys:

Each category can define a when condition as either:

• a single condition object
• an array of condition objects, where matching any one condition is enough

Within one condition, label and path predicates are combined with AND logic.

The condition keys are:

categories:
  - title: "🚀 Features"
    semver-increment: "minor"
    when:
      labels:
        - "feature"
        - "enhancement"
  - title: "🐛 Bug Fixes"
    when:
      - labels:
          - "bug"
          - "fix"
      - labels:
          - "regression"
        paths:
          - "src/**"
  - title: "⬆️ Dependencies"
    collapse-after: 0
    exclusive: true
    when:
      label: "dependencies"
  - type: "pre-exclude"
    when:
      label: "skip-changelog"

The labels-mode and paths-mode options control how the configured labels or path patterns are compared. any is the default. Path matching operates on the set of configured path patterns that matched the pull request.

Within a condition, label is shorthand for a single labels entry. If both label and labels are present, they are combined before labels-mode is applied. With the default labels-mode: any, labels: ["feature", "enhancement"] matches pull requests carrying either label.

Likewise, path is shorthand for a single paths entry. If both path and paths are present, they are combined before paths-mode is applied.

The available matching modes are:

• any: at least one configured value matches
• all: every configured value matches
• only: every change value is included in the configured set
• exactly: the change values and configured values are the same set

For path conditions, only and exactly compare against the set of configured path patterns that matched the pull request, not against raw changed file paths.

If a condition does not configure any label/labels or path/paths, the corresponding *-mode setting has no effect.

An omitted or empty when matches all changes, but the meaning depends on the category type:

• at most one type: changelog category may omit when; it becomes the bucket for otherwise uncategorized changes
• a type: version-resolver category with no when acts as the fallback when no other version-resolver category matches
• pre-include and pre-exclude categories with no when match every change

Changes with matching labels or paths will now be grouped together:

Adding such labels to your PRs can be automated by using the embedded Autolabeler action.

Optionally you can add a collapse-after entry to your category item, if the category has more than the defined collapse-after pull requests then it will show all pull requests collapsed for that category. Setting collapse-after to 0 will always collapse the category regardless of the number of pull requests, and setting it to -1 disables collapsing. Append the collapse-after integer to your category as following:

categories:
  - title: "⬆️ Dependencies"
    collapse-after: 3
    when:
      label: "dependencies"

Exclude Changes

The recommended way to exclude changes is a type: pre-exclude category. For example, append the following to your .github/release-drafter.yml file:

categories:
  - type: "pre-exclude"
    when:
      label: "skip-changelog"

Changes with the label "skip-changelog" will now be excluded from the release draft.

Include Changes

The recommended way to include only a subset of changes is a type: pre-include category. Only changes that match at least one pre-include category are kept for the rest of the pipeline. For example, append the following to your .github/release-drafter.yml file:

categories:
  - type: "pre-include"
    when:
      labels:
        - "app-foo"

Changes with the label "app-foo" will be the only changes included in the release draft.

Exclude Contributors

By default, the $CONTRIBUTORS variable will contain the names or usernames of all the contributors of a release. The exclude-contributors option allows you to remove certain usernames from that list. This can be useful if don't wish to include yourself, to better highlight only the third-party contributions.

exclude-contributors:
  - "myusername"

Replacers

You can search and replace content in the generated changelog body, using regular expressions, with the replacers option. Each replacer is applied in order.

replacers:
  - search: '/CVE-(\d{4})-(\d+)/g'
    replace: "https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-\$1-\$2"
  - search: "myname"
    replace: "My Name"
  - search: "/- ([a-z])/g"
    replace: '- \u\$1' # Uppercase the first letter of each changelog entry

search will be parsed to a RegExp, and replace supports substitution in the same flavour VSCode does.

Autolabeler

You can add automatically a label into a pull request, with the autolabeler action.

name: Auto Label

on:
  pull_request:
    # Only following types are handled by the action, but one can default to all as well
    types: [opened, reopened, synchronize]
  # pull_request_target event is required for autolabeler to support PRs from forks
  # pull_request_target:
  #   types: [opened, reopened, synchronize]

permissions:
  contents: read

jobs:
  auto_label:
    permissions:
      pull-requests: write
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      # runs autolabeler
      - uses: release-drafter/release-drafter/autolabeler@v7

Available matchers are files (glob), branch (regex), title (regex) and body (regex). Matchers are evaluated independently; the label will be set if at least one of the matchers meets the criteria.

# .github/release-drafter.yml
autolabeler:
  - label: "chore"
    files:
      - "*.md"
    branch:
      - '/docs{0,1}\/.+/'
  - label: "bug"
    branch:
      - '/fix\/.+/'
    title:
      - "/fix/i"
  - label: "enhancement"
    branch:
      - '/feature\/.+/'
    body:
      - "/JIRA-[0-9]{1,4}/"

# ... rest of release-drafter config

Prerelease workflow

Release draft supports working with prereleases. It expects your workflow to be :

• A stable release is published, ex: v3.5.0
• You merge or add meaningful changes your users may want to see, but you are not quite ready for production
• You publish a prerelease, ex: v3.5.0-rc.1
• You merge more changes
• You publish another prerelease, ex: v3.5.0-rc.2
• You decide code is ready for production, you publish v3.5.1 (or another increment based on your changes)

With release-drafter, you can draft each of these releases and prereleases with the appropriate content using parameter 'prerelease' and 'prerelease-identifier' - available as either an input of from the config-file.

jobs:
  update_full_release_draft:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: release-drafter/release-drafter@v6
        with:
          prerelease: false # the default
          # ... rest of your config
  update_prerelease_draft:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: release-drafter/release-drafter@v6
        with:
          prerelease: true
          prerelease-identifier: "rc" # Use semver identifiers : alpha, beta, rc, etc

Here, both jobs run in parallel every time you add changes to the configured branch.

• update_full_release_draft will pile-up changes since v3.5.0 inside a draft for v3.5.1 (or v3.6.0 or v4.0.0, depending on your config)
• update_prerelease_draft will pile-up changes since the last prerelease in a prerelease-draft. Changes are :
  • if no previous (published) prereleases are found - changes since v3.5.0 in a draft for v3.5.0-rc.1 (prerelease-draft)
  • or if v3.5.0-rc.1 exists (published) already - changes since v3.5.0-rc.1 in a draft for v3.5.0-rc.2 (prerelease-draft)

Some users like to run update_prerelease_draft with publish: true, such as prereleases are published immediately without the need for human intervention (or an external automation). Since prereleases are not meant to be stable in the first place, automation may be an acceptable risk for you too.

If you want your stable releases to include changes since the last prerelease instead of the last stable release, use include-pre-releases: true. This can reduce the number of changes included in the stable release body, but diverges from the standard workflow depicted above.

Projects that don't use Semantic Versioning

If your project doesn't follow Semantic Versioning you can still use Release Drafter, but you may want to set the version-template option to customize how the $NEXT_{PATCH,MINOR,MAJOR}_VERSION environment variables are generated.

For example, if your project doesn't use patch version numbers, you can set version-template to $MAJOR.$MINOR. If the current release is version 1.0, then $NEXT_MINOR_VERSION will be 1.1.

Action Inputs

The Release Drafter GitHub Action accepts a number of optional inputs directly in your workflow configuration. These will typically override default behavior specified in your release-drafter.yml config.

Action Outputs

The Release Drafter GitHub Action sets a couple of outputs which can be used as inputs to other Actions in the workflow (example).

GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES)

Release Drafter creates its GitHub client with @actions/github.getOctokit(). In GitHub Actions, that client uses the runtime API base URL from GITHUB_API_URL, so the same workflow can target GHES without extra github.com-specific configuration, assuming the required REST and GraphQL APIs are available on the instance.

Contributing

Third-party contributions are welcome! 🙏🏼 See CONTRIBUTING.md for step-by-step instructions.

If you need help or have a question, let us know via a GitHub issue.