Document how to configure what commit types are included in the changelog

[jcornaz]

This is a follow up on #459 which has been closed.

Yet, I still don't know how to configure release-please in order to include or exclude some commit types from the changelog generation.

[jbottigliero]

I wanted to add a comment here based on implementing release-please in a few different repositories recently that may help with closing out this issue... or at the very least help someone finding this issue in the future!

It seems the configuration of changelogSections, at the moment, is heavily dependent on using the GitHub Action implementation. Using the action, you can simply configure changelog-types, which will map your configuration to the changelogSections option parsed by the factory.

When using release-please (via CLI) on its own, there doesn't appear to be a way to configure this value – this seems to be blocked by the usage of yargs.strict (and the missing option for changelogSections), in addition to the argument likely being too large for most default terminal sessions (see [1] below).

It is possible configure the value when using release-please programmatically:

Example

const ReleasePlease = require('release-please');
const chalk = require('chalk');

// @see https://github.com/googleapis/release-please/blob/master/src/bin/release-please.ts#L182
function handleError(err) {
  let status = '';
  const command = argv._.length === 0 ? '' : argv._[0];
  if (err.status) {
    status = '' + err.status;
  }
  console.error(chalk.red(`command ${command} failed${status ? ` with status ${status}` : ''}`));
  if (argv.debug) {
    console.error('---------');
    console.error(err.stack);
  }
  process.exitCode = 1;
}
const rp = ReleasePlease.ReleasePRFactory.build('node', {
  repoUrl: 'my-org/my-repository,
  packageName: 'my-package',
  defaultBranch: 'trunk',
  token: process.env.SENSATIVE_VALUE,
  changelogSections: [
    {type: 'feat', section: 'Features'},
    {type: 'fix', section: 'Bug Fixes'},
    {type: 'perf', section: 'Performance Improvements'},
    {type: 'deps', section: 'Dependencies'},
    {type: 'revert', section: 'Reverts'},
    {type: 'docs', section: 'Documentation'},
    {type: 'style', section: 'Styles'},
    {type: 'chore', section: 'Miscellaneous Chores'},
    {type: 'refactor', section: 'Code Refactoring'},
    {type: 'test', section: 'Tests'},
    {type: 'build', section: 'Build System'},
    {type: 'ci', section: 'Continuous Integration'}
  ]
});
rp.run().catch(handleError);

I'm currently using the above to trigger release-please with custom changelog sections using Google Cloud Build.

---

[1] In general, it seems like the release-please CLI might benefit from using yargs.pkgConf to support this feature from both the action and the CLI utility... but I'm not sure that is in line with the roadmap here.

I'd be happy to contribute toward documentation or potentially an update to the CLI with a little better understanding of planned changes. Regardless, I hope someone finds this information useful, and if I've misinterpreted any of the implementations do let me know and I'll update (or remove) this comment!

[bcoe]

@jbottigliero would happily take your contributions 😄

It's not intentional that the CLI and the action have drifted apart, it was just that I wanted to get the feature shipped for someone who needed it in the action... you're probably right that we would do better to use an abstraction like pkgConf, it would be good to figure out a way to share as much code as possible between the CLI and action.