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Generating changelogs and porting guide entries in a collection

You can create and share changelog and porting guide entries for your collection. If your collection is part of the Ansible Community package, we recommend that you use the antsibull-changelog tool to generate Ansible-compatible changelogs. The Ansible changelog uses the output of this tool to collate all the collections included in an Ansible release into one combined changelog for the release.

Note

Ansible here refers to the Ansible 2.10 or later release that includes a curated set of collections.

Understanding antsibull-changelog

The antsibull-changelog tool allows you to create and update changelogs for Ansible collections that are compatible with the combined Ansible changelogs. This is an update to the changelog generator used in prior Ansible releases. The tool adds three new changelog fragment categories: breaking_changes, security_fixes and trivial. The tool also generates the changelog.yaml file that Ansible uses to create the combined CHANGELOG.rst file and Porting Guide for the release.

See Creating a changelog fragment and the antsibull-changelog documentation for complete details.

Note

The collection maintainers set the changelog policy for their collections. See the individual collection contributing guidelines for complete details.

Generating changelogs

To initialize changelog generation:

1. Install antsibull-changelog: pip install antsibull-changelog.

2. Initialize changelogs for your repository: antsibull-changelog init <path/to/your/collection>.

3. Optionally, edit the changelogs/config.yaml file to customize the location of the generated changelog .rst file or other options. See Bootstrapping changelogs for collections for details.

To generate changelogs from the changelog fragments you created:

1. Optionally, validate your changelog fragments: antsibull-changelog lint.

2. Generate the changelog for your release: antsibull-changelog release [--version version_number].

Note

Add the --reload-plugins option if you ran the antsibull-changelog release command previously and the version of the collection has not changed. antsibull-changelog caches the information on all plugins and does not update its cache until the collection version changes.

Porting Guide entries from changelog fragments

The Ansible changelog generator automatically adds several changelog fragment categories to the Ansible Porting Guide:

• major_changes

• breaking_changes

• deprecated_features

• removed_features

Including collection changelogs into Ansible

If your collection is part of Ansible, use one of the following three options to include your changelog into the Ansible release changelog:

• Use the antsibull-changelog tool.

• If are not using this tool, include the properly formatted changelog.yaml file into your collection. See the changelog.yaml format for details.

• Add a link to own changelogs or release notes in any format by opening an issue at https://github.com/ansible-community/ansible-build-data/ with the HTML link to that information.

Note

For the first two options, Ansible pulls the changelog details from Galaxy so your changelogs must be included in the collection version on Galaxy that is included in the upcoming Ansible release.

See also

Using collections

Learn how to install and use collections.

Contributing to Ansible-maintained Collections

Guidelines for contributing to selected collections

Mailing List

The development mailing list

Real-time chat

How to join Ansible chat channels