Add option to use annotated tag message as release notes

[spenserblack]

Annotated tags can contain release notes, and it would be nice if this action provided an option to use the tag's message as the GitHub Release notes.

[spenserblack]

Note: Looks like git tag -l --format="%(contents:body)" <tag name> gets the tag message. Until this is implemented a workaround could be to write the contents to a file and use body_path, or set the result as an output in a previous step.

[spenserblack]

I think I finally got the workaround working :weary: This is an example of what I did

name: Release
on:
  push:
    tags: ['v*.*.*']

jobs:
  release-notes:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
        with:
          ref: ${{ github.ref }}
      - name: Get Release Notes
        run: 'echo "$(git tag -l --format="%(contents:body)" $GITHUB_REF_NAME)" > RELEASE_NOTES'
      - name: Set Release Notes
        uses: softprops/action-gh-release@v1
        with:
          body_path: RELEASE_NOTES

[softprops]

Neat trick. Quick heads up this action now supports GitHubs automatically generated release notes

https://github.com/softprops/action-gh-release/blob/58fa4b7a8863f6beaf115a49196308842b8b0f06/action.yml#L43

[Fuseteam]

I would still like to use the tag annotation as release notes xd

[spenserblack]

@Fuseteam I ended up writing a simple action that uses gh since I was repeating the same workflow a lot. It doesn't do much except take the subject (first line) of a tag message and make it the release title, and take the body (lines 3 and over) and make it the release body. Feel free to check it out :smiley: If you need more complicated usage, you can use tag-to-release to create a release and this action to do other stuff like upload assets.

[Fuseteam]

@spenserblack awesome i'll take a look xD

[Fuseteam]

@spenserblack i tried to combine it but it used my commit message as the title and left the body empty xd i think this overwrote it :p

[spenserblack]

Oh yeah it pretty naively tries to get the latest tag message. It also needs to be checked out at the ref (see the actions/checkout part of the example). The action actually uses itself, so you can see that as an example. https://github.com/spenserblack/actions-tag-to-release/blob/d5607a72fb47a8614e1154ca456d5b7eaf0c10ab/.github/workflows/release.yml#L1-L16

If you have any more trouble with it please open an issue on that repo 🙂

[Fuseteam]

Cool thanks~