// the find
mikepenz/release-changelog-builder-action
A GitHub action that builds your release notes / changelog fast, easy and exactly the way you want.
A GitHub Action that auto-generates release notes by pulling merged PRs between two tags and grouping them by label into configurable categories. It's the go-to choice if your team labels PRs and uses GitHub releases — the configuration surface is wide enough to handle most real-world formatting requirements without writing custom scripts.
The template system is genuinely well-designed: separate templates for the overall changelog, individual PRs, and empty states, with placeholder support that covers authors, reviewers, approvers, labels, and even nested array access like REVIEWS[*].body. Label extraction via regex means it works with Conventional Commits without any separate parsing step — just write a pattern that maps 'feat' to a label and your categories populate automatically. The test suite commits fixture caches so tests run against recorded API responses rather than hitting GitHub, which keeps CI fast and deterministic. Monorepo support via includeOnlyPaths is a real feature, not an afterthought, and the exportCache/importCache split lets you separate data fetching from changelog generation across workflow steps.
COMMIT and HYBRID modes are explicitly documented as 'not fully supported', which is a meaningful gap — squash-merge workflows are common and you may hit rough edges with no clear fix. includeOnlyPaths in the default (non-offline) mode fires an extra API call per commit to determine which files changed, so on a large monorepo diff with hundreds of commits you'll burn through GitHub's rate limit fast. The entire system collapses to 'uncategorized' if your team doesn't label PRs consistently — there's no fallback heuristic, no commit message parsing in PR mode, just an uncategorized bucket. Tag resolution drops any tag that doesn't parse as semver, which quietly breaks changelog generation for projects using date-based or non-standard versioning without a clear error message.