Sphinx Github Changelog: Build a sphinx changelog from GitHub Releases

Sphinx-github-changelog is a Sphinx plugin that builds a changelog section based on a repository's GitHub Releases content.

How ? (the short version)

In your Sphinx documentation conf.py:

extensions = [
    ...,  # your other extensions
    "sphinx_github_changelog",
]

In your documentation:

.. changelog::
    :changelog-url: https://your-project.readthedocs.io/en/stable/#changelog
    :github: https://github.com/you/your-project/releases/
    :pypi: https://pypi.org/project/your-project/

or more minimally (but not necessarily recommended):

.. changelog::

See the end result for this project on ReadTheDocs.

Why ?

On the way to continuous delivery, it's important to be able to release easily. One of the criteria for easy releases is that the release doesn't require a commit and a Pull Request. Release Pull Requests usually include 2 parts:

• Changing the version
• Updating the changelog (if you keep a changelog, let's assume you do)

Commitless releases need a way to store the version and the changelog, as close as possible to the code, but actually not in the code.

Setting aside the "version" question, sphinx-github-changelog aims at providing a good way of managing the "changelog" part:

The best solution we've found so far for the changelog is to store it in the body of GitHub Releases. That's very practical for maintainers, but it may not be the first place people will look for it. As far as we've seen, people expect the changelog to be:

• in the repo, in CHANGELOG.rst,
• in the built documentation.

Having the changelog in CHANGELOG.rst causes a few problems:

• Either each PR adds its single line of changelog, but:

  • you'll most probably run into countless merge conflicts,
  • the changelog won't tell you which contribution was part of which release

  This reduces the interest for the whole thing.

• Or your changelog is edited at release time. Maybe you're using towncrier for fragment-based changelog, but you're not doing commitless releases anymore. You could imagine that the release commit is done by your CI, but this can quickly become annoying, especially if you require Pull Requests.

But there is another way. Instead of providing the changelog, the CHANGELOG.rst file can hold a link to the changelog. This makes things much easier. sphinx-github-changelog encourages you to do that.

Reference documentation

Automatic Configuration

The extension can automatically detect the GitHub repository URL from your git remotes in this order:

1. upstream remote
2. origin remote

The GitHub API base URL and GitHub root URL are derived from this URL.

If for any reason, you'd rather provide the repository explicitly (e.g. the doc repo doesn't match the repo you're releasing from, or anything else), you can define the :github: attribute to the directive. See directive for details.

Authentication

The extension uses the GitHub Releases REST API to retrieve the changelog.

For public repositories, this can usually work without authentication, though it's not recommended as GitHub applies IP-based rate limits, so this may make your builds flaky. Note that there will be automatic retries after HTTP 429 responses, controlled by the sphinx_github_changelog_retries option (see below). For private repositories (or when unauthenticated requests are rate limited), you need a GitHub API token.

Tokens can be read from (in this order):

• sphinx_github_changelog_token in conf.py (please do NOT commit your secrets)
• SPHINX_GITHUB_CHANGELOG_TOKEN environment variable
• GITHUB_TOKEN environment variable
• Your git configuration, using git's credential system
• The gh command, using the auth token command

When using GitHub Actions, you can pass a token explicitly as an environment variable:

- name: Build documentation
  run: make html
  env:
    SPHINX_GITHUB_CHANGELOG_TOKEN: ${{ github.token }}

If you're not in one of the cases above and your build environment cannot use anonymous API access reliably (e.g. rate limits), you'll need a personal access token. If the repository is public, the token doesn't need any special access (you can uncheck everything). For private and internal repositories, the token must have repo scope (classic tokens) or contents: read access (fine-grained tokens).

Pass the token as the SPHINX_GITHUB_CHANGELOG_TOKEN (or GITHUB_TOKEN) environment variable. You can also set the token as sphinx_github_changelog_token in conf.py, but you should never commit secrets such as this.

Extension options (conf.py)

All options can also be set via environment variables of the same name in uppercase (e.g. SPHINX_GITHUB_CHANGELOG_TOKEN).

Option	Default	Description
sphinx_github_changelog_token	None	GitHub API token. See above (please do NOT commit your secrets).
sphinx_github_changelog_root_repo	None	Root URL to the repository. Usually detected automatically.
sphinx_github_changelog_include_prereleases	True	Whether to include pre-releases in the changelog. Set to False to exclude them (env var accepts 0, false, no).
sphinx_github_changelog_retries	3	Number of retries after HTTP 429 responses from GitHub API. Will wait exponentially longer between each retry, starting at 5 second.

Directive

.. changelog::
    :changelog-url: https://your-project.readthedocs.io/en/stable/changelog.html
    :github: https://github.com/you/your-project/releases/
    :pypi: https://pypi.org/project/your-project/

Attributes

• github (optional): URL to the releases page of the repository. If not provided, auto-detected from your git remote, as described above.
• changelog-url (optional): URL to the built version of your changelog. sphinx-github-changelog will display a link to your built changelog if the GitHub token is not provided (hopefully, this does not happen in your built documentation)
• pypi (optional): URL to the PyPI page of the repository. This allows the changelog to display links to each PyPI release.

You'll notice that each parameter here is not requested in the simplest form but as very specific URLs from which the program extracts the needed information. This is done on purpose. If people browse the unbuilt version of your documentation (e.g. on GitHub or PyPI directly), they'll still be presented with links to the pages that contain the information they will need, instead of unhelping directives.

Check out the built version!

This Readme is also built as a Sphinx documentation, and it includes the changelog. Interested to see how it looks? Check it out on our ReadTheDocs space.

If you encounter a bug, or want to get in touch, you're always welcome to open a ticket.

Other links

• Code of Conduct.
• License.
• Contributing Guidelines.