towncrier VS standard-version

I don't really like writing the change log automatically from commits. I think those both have a slightly different audience and thus need different wording.

I know the frustration of merge conflicts on the change log file.

Right now, I'm creating change logs by hand which is time consuming to do on release time. I'm considering switching to using towncrier or something similar, where you have a changes dir with one file per change for creating change logs --> https://towncrier.readthedocs.io/

Here is an example of another decent one. Not perfect, but it is generated with TownCrier, so it is easy to maintain.

We used to... somewhat attempt manual changelogs. Every time it came to a release the release manager would ask around for what the key changes were, and we usually ended up with only a couple of entries.

Now, we use https://github.com/twisted/towncrier . Every change goes through pull requests, and every PR must have a newsfragment file - and we enforce this with a test that fails if it isn't present (with convenience functions of rewriting the number to match the PR if you name the news file XXX.{category}). If it's not a user-facing change, then we just have a category that is ignored.

On releases (or on individual PRS along the way), the release manager generates the changelog, but also edits them into a relatively coherent style (or rewrites developers news fragments along the way).

Every change has a note written aimed at the user. Every entry in the changelog has a link to the relevant PR or commit. We have much better changelogs now.

Twisted's Town Crier is a generic tool

Using Conventional Commits ⭐ as a standard for your commit messages, makes Semantic Versioning 🔖 as easy as can be, with tools like Conventional Changelog 📄 Standard Version 🔖 and Semantic Release 📦🚀

Dive deeper into the world of Husky with the official documentation. Explore the capabilities of Standard Version through its comprehensive documentation. Unravel the mysteries of semantic-release with its detailed documentation. Discover the versatility of bumpp with its comprehensive documentation.

We can use standard-version tool to generate a changelog, bump the version of app and create a new tag automatically.

There are many great tools to help with automation here, some of them are action-semantic-pull-request to enforce conventional commits and standard version to bump the version and create a changelog according to the conventional commits.

I tried gitmoji and followed Make everyone in your project write beautiful commit messages using commitlint and commitizen by @sohandutta, but end up using the setting in this article because it's not compatible to changelog generation of standard-version (Ref: Issue #859)

As a bonus point, the issues you create in your repository can also serve as part of the documentation. You can outline new features there and you will even be able to generate changelogs from the merged pull requests (like I do using conventional-changelog/standard-version).

There’s also a husky precommit hook with ESlint and Prettier fixing and formatting changed code on every commit with lint-staged which makes sure malformed code doesn't even make it to the Pull Request. Combined with standard-version and strict commit messages it makes releasing and changelog generation a breeze. For a contributor the workflow is as smooth as:

But you can also automate even more, if, for example, you write according to Conventional Commits, you can also automate the creation of tags using the standard-version library.

# Changelog All notable changes to this project will be documented in this file. See \[standard-version\](https://github.com/conventional-changelog/standard-version) for commit guidelines. ## 1.1.0 (2021-07-12) ### Features * **new-feature:** add a new-feature to our project 11c0322

Standard Version