Question

i want to create an automatic release notes mechanizem.
what i’m trying to do is before each deploy go over all the commits i made using git and generate a commit logs from it.
i already looked here: http://gitref.org/inspect/#log and found out commands like:

git log --oneline --before={3.weeks.ago} --after={2010-04-18} --no-merges

the problem is that i don’t know the dates nor author or any other filtering. the only thing i can know is that this is a new doploy so i need a way to store some index upon each deploy and grep all the commits since the last index. i’m using github as hosting.
is there a way to do that?

Answer 1

ok – so you need a range, but you say you don’t know ‘date or author’, but you should know the commit sha at least?

git log XXXX..XXXXX --format='%ad %an: %s' --no-merges --date=short

where XXXX is your commit

or like Ikke says use tags instead, every time you release to production, tag with a build number, so then you just need the last production tag and the new production tag

git log p-5010..p-5011 --format='%s' --date=short

.

---

Leaving this section in case someone finds useful: not the answer but related to git log

git log --format='%ad %an: %s' --before={3.weeks.ago} --after={2012-05-18} --no-merges --date=short

just grabbed some code from my .gitconfig and merged it with what you have

my .gitconfig alias for git l

[alias]
    l = log -20 --format='%h %ad %d %an: %s' --date=short

git l
# returns last 20 commits
e42c322 YYYY-MM-DD  (tag-if-exists) John Doe: commit message
849c968 YYYY-MM-DD  John Doe: commit message
...