Summary

One of the most important parts of the software lifecycle is releasing your code for others to consume. GitHub Releases will make that even easier by providing compelling and automatic release notes. When creating a Release, you can click a button to automatically generate release notes. If you want something more custom, you can a REST API to get the generated release notes and integrate them into your existing releases process.

We also want to ensure that these release notes look amazing when a maintainer shares them and make them easier to discover. We have done a complete redesign of releases to make projects announcements look stunning. We are surfacing these releases in the feed to increase discovery. We are also improving the open graph data for releases so they look equally fantastic when shared off of the GitHub platform.

Intended Outcome

Our number one goal is to make it easy for maintainers to create great release notes so more people can discover that amazing work maintainers are doing. With minimal effort many projects will be able to benefit from detailed release notes. For maintainers who put more time into their release notes to write editorialized content the intended outcome is that we free up time they are currently spending to maintain custom infrastructure and compile a changelog so they can focus on the most important content for their customers, high quality editorialized content.

Our other goal is to ensure that the release notes look great and are something maintainers and developers are excited to read and share.

How will it work?

• The new Releases UI will be automatically enabled for all customers
• A new button in the Release creation UI will be able to be pressed to generate release notes from any tag
• The generated notes will be able to be configured via a .github/release.yml
• A new REST API will allow customers to generate notes at their own convenience to further automate and customize the experience with GitHub actions.