Git + Capistrano = Automatic Release Notes Generator ?

Question

We use git (github) and capistrano (like 99% of the Rails shops out there) to deploy our app to production.

What I'd like to do is, after every cap * deploy generate a text file containing all the git commit comments since the last deploy. I can then take that list of commit comments, clean it up, and put it somewhere for consumption.

"git log" http://book.git-scm.com/3_reviewing_history_-_git_log.html has plenty of options for fetching log messages, but I don't see an easy way in capistrano to return the current and previous commits, or even the last date/time a deployment occurred, so I can pass that to git log

Thoughts? I can't be the first one doing this... Thanks!

Answer 1

If capistrano doesn't do this, you can wrap it in another script/tool, say, release.

When you launch release, it records the commit, compares it with the previously recorded commit, calls a release notes generator script/tool, and then calls capistrano.