Setup Changelog

This documentation was generated with the assistance of AI. Please report any inaccuracies.

Create a root CHANGELOG.md for a repository by reconstructing its release history from git tags, GitHub Releases, and the actual code changes between them — not by guessing or leaving placeholder entries.

Purpose

iru-setup-changelog backfills one Keep a Changelog entry per past release, using whichever source is most reliable for that release: a non-empty GitHub Release body if one exists (lightly reformatted rather than copied verbatim), or a derived analysis of git log/diffs between tags otherwise. It skips changes that don’t affect users of the project (tooling, CI, formatting-only diffs) unless they’re genuinely the entire content of a release, in which case it says so plainly rather than inventing something more exciting. This skill is explicitly not idempotent and is a one-time bootstrap only: Step 1 checks whether CHANGELOG.md (or an equivalent like CHANGELOG.rst/HISTORY.md) already exists at the repository root, and if it does, the skill stops immediately and makes no changes — it never merges into, extends, or touches an existing changelog, since that file may already follow its own format and cadence.

Purpose group

Repository Bootstrap

Invocation

/iru-setup-changelog

Inputs

Argument Required Description Default

(none)

No

This skill takes no arguments — it works entirely from the repository’s actual release history: git tags (git for-each-ref), and, if hosted on GitHub with gh available and authenticated, each tag’s GitHub Release body via gh release view.

Not applicable.

Outputs

  • CHANGELOG.md at the repository root, in Keep a Changelog format, with one [<version>] - <date> section per past release (newest first, an empty [Unreleased] at the very top) plus a compare-link reference section if the remote is GitHub.

  • Only produced if CHANGELOG.md didn’t already exist. If it did, the skill makes no changes at all and simply reports that an existing changelog was found and left untouched — this is a one-time bootstrap, not an idempotent fill-gaps tool.

  • If no git tags exist at all, the skill asks the user whether to create a minimal file with just an ## [Unreleased] section, or stop entirely rather than inventing version numbers.

  • A closing report: how many releases were reconstructed and their version range, which releases used a GitHub Release body versus derived commit/diff analysis, any release noted as tooling/docs-only, and whether compare links were included or omitted.

Execution flow

flowchart TD A[Start /iru-setup-changelog] --> B{"CHANGELOG.md (or\nequivalent) already exists?"} B -- yes --> Z["Stop immediately.\nNo changes made."] B -- no --> C["Step 2: Discover release history\n(git tags, GitHub Releases via gh)"] C --> D{"Any tags found?"} D -- no --> E["Ask user: minimal Unreleased-only\nfile, or stop entirely?"] D -- yes --> F["Step 3: For each release,\ndetermine source of content\n(GitHub Release body vs. derived diffs);\nlong tag history fans out to\nchange-summarizer agents"] F --> G["Step 4: Compose each release's\nKeep a Changelog subsections"] G --> H["Step 5: Determine each version's\ndate and ordering"] H --> I["Step 6: Write CHANGELOG.md"] I --> J["Step 7: Report"] E --> J

Dependencies

Invokes

None — iru-setup-changelog does not call any other skill in this catalog, but see "Related agents" below for a sub-agent it delegates to.

Invoked by

  • Setup Java Library Repository — Step 7 runs iru-setup-changelog with no args, working entirely from the repository’s own git tag/GitHub Release history.

Related agents

  • iru-change-summarizer — Step 3, dispatched one per past release (or small batch of releases) instead of reading every diff inline, when the repository’s tag history is long enough (a few dozen releases or more) that doing so serially would be context-heavy.

Source

SKILL.md on GitHub — the file this page was generated from.