git shortlog for Release Notes: Usage & CI Errors

git shortlog between two tags is the simplest reliable way to draft release notes in a pipeline.

This pattern turns a commit range into grouped, deduplicated release notes - with the CI caveats that trip teams up.

What it does

Run against a tag-to-HEAD range, git shortlog groups commit subjects by author so a release job can emit a contributor-attributed changelog without external tooling.

Common usage

# notes since the previous tag:
PREV=$(git describe --tags --abbrev=0 HEAD^)
git shortlog --no-merges "$PREV"..HEAD
# just the contributor list:
git shortlog -sne "$PREV"..HEAD

Common errors in CI

git shortlog without a range or piped input can block waiting on stdin in non-interactive CI - always pass an explicit range. fatal: No names found / a bad PREV happens when no earlier tag exists or tags were not fetched; guard the describe call and set fetch-depth: 0.

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