Git changelog: how to get all changes up to a specific tag?

Question

Is there an easy way or command to get all git commits up to a specific tag to generate an automatic changelog for a project? I always tag my git repos with a version number lik

Answer 1

An update to the script suggested by Creotiv to get better sorting of the tags

#!/bin/bash
# Author:Andrey Nikishaev, Gunnar Lindholm
echo "CHANGELOG"
echo ----------------------
git for-each-ref --sort='*authordate' --format='%(tag)' refs/tags |tac |grep -v '^$' | while read TAG ; do
     echo
    if [ $NEXT ];then
        echo [$NEXT]
    else
        echo "[Current]"
    fi
    GIT_PAGER=cat git log --no-merges --format=" * %s" $TAG..$NEXT
    NEXT=$TAG
done
FIRST=$(git tag -l | head -1)
echo
echo [$FIRST]
GIT_PAGER=cat git log --no-merges --format=" * %s" $FIRST

Answer 2

Just append tagname to your command and you should be fine :) I like the --graph switch to visualize the branches that led to that tag :)

Answer 3

For creating changelog by tags, i used this script:

#!/bin/bash
# Author:Andrey Nikishaev
echo "CHANGELOG"
echo ----------------------
git tag -l | sort -u -r | while read TAG ; do
    echo
    if [ $NEXT ];then
        echo [$NEXT]
    else
        echo "[Current]"
    fi
    GIT_PAGER=cat git log --no-merges --format=" * %s" $TAG..$NEXT
    NEXT=$TAG
done
FIRST=$(git tag -l | head -1)
echo
echo [$FIRST]
GIT_PAGER=cat git log --no-merges --format=" * %s" $FIRST