Getting Started

What is AutoChangelog?

AutoChangelog automatically generates beautiful, human-readable changelogs from your GitHub repositories. When you deploy your code, our AI analyzes your changes and writes clear, customer-friendly release notes that explain what changed and why it matters to your users.

How It Works

AutoChangelog uses a webhook-based approach that ensures your changelog is generated when changes actually go live. You add a simple webhook call to your deployment pipeline, and when deployment succeeds, the webhook triggers AutoChangelog. We fetch the commits and pull requests from GitHub since your last changelog entry, send them to our AI for analysis, and create a new changelog entry. This approach means your changelog always reflects what's actually deployed, not just what's been merged.

Quick Start

Step 1: Sign in with GitHub

Click "Sign in with GitHub" on the homepage to get started. You'll be prompted to install our GitHub App, which gives us read-only access to your repositories. We never write to your repos or store your source code.

Step 2: Enable a Repository

From your dashboard, go to Repositories and click "Enable" on the repository you want to track. When you enable it, we'll generate a unique webhook URL and secret for that repository. You'll use these to authenticate changelog generation requests from your deployment pipeline.

Step 3: Add the Webhook to Your Deployment

Add a webhook call to your deployment pipeline that runs after a successful deployment. The simplest approach is a curl command with HMAC authentication. Here's a basic example:

# Your webhook credentials (from repository settings)
WEBHOOK_URL="https://autochangelog.com/api/v1/hooks/your-webhook-uid"
SECRET="your-webhook-secret"

# Request body (bump can be "patch", "minor", or "major")
BODY='{"bump": "patch"}'

# Compute HMAC-SHA256 signature
SIGNATURE="sha256=$(echo -n "$BODY" | openssl dgst -sha256 -hmac "$SECRET" | cut -d' ' -f2)"

# Trigger changelog generation
curl -X POST "$WEBHOOK_URL" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "X-Webhook-Signature: $SIGNATURE" \
  -d "$BODY"

If you're using GitHub Actions, you can add this as a step in your workflow. Store your webhook URL and secret as repository secrets, then call them after deployment:

- name: Generate Changelog
  if: success()
  run: |
    BODY='{"bump": "patch"}'
    SIGNATURE="sha256=$(echo -n "$BODY" | openssl dgst -sha256 -hmac "${{ secrets.AUTOCHANGELOG_SECRET }}" | cut -d' ' -f2)"
    curl -X POST "${{ secrets.AUTOCHANGELOG_WEBHOOK_URL }}" \
      -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
      -H "X-Webhook-Signature: $SIGNATURE" \
      -d "$BODY"

Find your webhook URL and secret in your repository settings on AutoChangelog. See the CI/CD Integration and Webhook API docs for detailed setup instructions and examples for other platforms.

Step 4: Deploy Something

Push a change and let your deployment pipeline run. When it completes successfully and calls the webhook, AutoChangelog will fetch your recent commits from GitHub, generate a summary, and create your first changelog entry.

Step 5: Review and Publish

Whether entries are published immediately or saved as drafts depends on your auto-publish setting. For private repositories, entries are saved as drafts by default so you can review them first. For public repositories, entries are published immediately after a successful deployment by default. You can change this anytime in your repository settings. Either way, you can always edit entries using our rich text editor to adjust the title, summary, body text, tags, and version number.

Manual Generation

You don't have to wait for your deployment pipeline to generate entries. Click "Fetch Updates" on any repository to generate a changelog from recent commits immediately. You can also click "Create New Entry" to write a changelog entry from scratch without any AI generation.

Your Public Changelog

Each repository gets a public changelog page at https://autochangelog.com/changelog/your-username/your-repo. This page shows all your published entries with your chosen template styling. You can also set up a custom domain like changelog.yourapp.com, embed the changelog directly in your website, or customize the look with templates.

Next Steps

Now that you understand the basics, let's dive deeper into specific topics. Learn about GitHub Integration to understand what permissions we need and how we access your data. Read about how entries are generated to understand what the AI does with your commits. Or jump straight to CI/CD integration for detailed setup instructions for your specific deployment platform.