Quick changelog with git

Whenever I stumble upon a quick command line that I think is re-usable and useful, I’m collecting it in my personal wiki. This way I can spare me the search on Stackoverflow when I need to repeat a mundane task again. And again. And again…

Here’s the latest piece: Building a simple changelog between the two most recent tags in git.

TAG1=$(git describe --abbrev=0 --tags `git rev-list --tags --max-count=2 | sort | head -n 1`)
TAG2=$(git describe --abbrev=0 --tags `git rev-list --tags --max-count=2 | sort -r | head -n 1`)
git log --oneline $TAG1..$TAG2

The result should look somewhat like this:

...
73ac1fb new post
f576da1 Fix post layout
dff4def Remove picture
47255be Create 2018-07-06-selfmade-phone-wallpaper.md
64259c6 Add link to massdrop
c501c99 Remove disqus from config
1eb82df Disable disqus
...

If you’re not super diligent with your commits, you might want to clean up the changelog and only keep relevant commits in the list. Nobody wants to read about fixing typos in a changelog…

• git