How to skip release date in version title?

[perspilling]

I would like to not have a generated date in the version title as the date is already part of our release tag, i.e. our release tags look like this: v22.10.18-build997.170f99f91

We also have some cases where the tag might have been added after the commit that triggered the build (this is a temporary issue as the tag is now added automatically with every build, but it wasn't in earlier releases). If we have such a tag that was added after the commit that triggered the build we get a version title in the changelog that might look like this:

## v22.10.18-build997.170f99f91 - 2022-10-21

Is it possible to avoid that date in the title?

[perspilling]

Btw. I also tried to set the release-date like this:

      - name: Extract release date from TO_TAG
        id: release_date
        run: |
          echo "RELEASE_DATE=$(echo ${{ env.TO_TAG }} | awk -F  '[v-]' '{print $2}')" >>  $GITHUB_ENV

      - name: Update CHANGELOG
        uses: stefanzweifel/changelog-updater-action@v1.6.0
        with:
          release-date: ${{ env.RELEASE_DATE }}

..but that had no effect, i.e. it didn't use the date (22.10.18) I supplied.

[perspilling]

Hmm, maybe it is a problem with the nektos/act version that I'm using to test this locally...

[perspilling]

Yes, indeed: nektos/act#1386

[perspilling]

I will use set-output for now then

[perspilling]

This works in act:

      - name: Extract release date from TO_TAG
        id: release_date
#        run: echo "releaseDate=$(echo ${{ env.TO_TAG }} | awk -F  '[v-]' '{print $2}')" >>  $GITHUB_OUTPUT # not supported by act yet
        run: echo ::set-output name=releaseDate::$(echo ${{ env.TO_TAG }} | awk -F  '[v-]' '{print $2}')

      - name: Update CHANGELOG
        uses: stefanzweifel/changelog-updater-action@v1.6.0
        with:
          release-date: ${{ steps.release_date.outputs.releaseDate }}

and then the release date is indeed set to the yy.mm.dd date given in the version tag :-)

[stefanzweifel]

Great!

Yeah, GitHub is currently changing how these output parameters work. Both Actions you're using from me support this already or will in the next couple of days.
stefanzweifel/php-changelog-updater#30
stefanzweifel/git-auto-commit-action#250

[stefanzweifel]

It's currently not possible to "disable" adding a release date to each heading.
The Action is quite opinionated and follows the Keep a Changelog format as much as possible.

The "Keep a Changelog" format strongly recommends adding a date to each release:

The release date of each version is displayed.

---

The Action is powered by a CLI. The date there is also required and will always be appended to a heading. Here's the source code for that: https://github.com/stefanzweifel/php-changelog-updater/blob/main/app/CreateNewReleaseHeading.php#L21

I plan to work on all my GitHub Actions this weekend.
Maybe I can find a good way to disable adding a release date to new headings … even though I strongly oppose doing such a change. 😅

[perspilling]

Ok, good. I don't mind having a date if I can set the date via the release-date property as shown above. Did you test that?

[stefanzweifel]

I didn't test the release-date option with your input this weekend, but it should definitely work. (There is an automated test to cover that)

A popular open-source framework uses the Action in their workflows too.
When a new release is created, the date is extracted from the git-history.

You can find the workflow here:
https://github.com/laravel/.github/blob/main/.github/workflows/update-changelog.yml#L30

The workflow is also listed under the advanced usage section here: https://github.com/stefanzweifel/changelog-updater-action#use-tag-date-as-release-date