About CHANGELOG.md Generator

Keep a Changelog starter with [Unreleased] + first version section. Part of the DevTools Surf developer suite. Browse more tools in the Generators collection.

Use Cases

• Maintainers starting a changelog for their first public release
• Release managers documenting breaking changes for major versions
• Teams adopting Keep a Changelog format across all repositories
• Product managers tracking feature additions between releases

Tips

• Start with an [Unreleased] section for ongoing changes
• Follow Keep a Changelog format for community recognition
• Link version headers to git comparison URLs for traceability

Fun Facts

• The 'Keep a Changelog' format was created by Olivier Lacan in 2014 and has been adopted by thousands of open-source projects as a de facto standard.
• Semantic Versioning (SemVer), which changelogs typically reference, was formalized by Tom Preston-Werner (GitHub co-founder) in his SemVer 2.0.0 specification in 2013.
• Conventional Commits, a specification for structured commit messages that auto-generate changelogs, was first published in 2017 and is used by Angular, Vue, and Electron.

FAQ

What format does it follow?

Keep a Changelog (keepachangelog.com) — the de facto standard. Sections: Added, Changed, Deprecated, Removed, Fixed, Security. [Unreleased] at the top, dated versions below.

How does it handle semver?

The generator prompts for the first version number (default 0.1.0 per semver). Subsequent releases you edit manually — the tool is a starter, not a git-aware release automator.

Can I use it with auto-changelog tools?

Yes — the output format is compatible with conventional-changelog, release-please, and changesets. Use this tool to seed your first CHANGELOG.md.

Is there a machine-readable variant?

Toggle to JSON output. Useful for release automation and cross-language tooling. Still follows Keep a Changelog's structure.