ci: add chloggen and workflows for changelog generation by agarvin-nr · Pull Request #616 · newrelic/nrdot-collector-releases

agarvin-nr · 2026-07-07T23:02:30Z

Summary

Adds OpenTelemetry's chloggen tool to this repo for changelog management.

Adds chloggen make targets
Enforces a changelog entry is created with each PR
Changelog is skippable with:
- "Skip Changelog" label
- Any conventional commit prefix chore*, build*, ci*, refactor*, style*, or test*

Release Flow

Developers create a changelog entry with every PR if needed
Bumping component versions with ci-bump-component-versions workflow automatically creates changelog entry like Bump component versions from v... to v...
a. If relevant changes are found with the version-bump-analysis skill, we can either elaborate using the subtext: field on the autogenerated entry, or generate our own entries as needed.
Bumping nrdot version with release-bump-version-pr will consolidate all changelog entries using make chlog-update into CHANGELOG.md
The release-draft workflow extracts the most recent changes from CHANGELOG.md and provides to goreleaser via --release-notes (this replaces the previous changelog generation)
Unchanged from before: After we publish, the release-publish workflow will issue a docs PR from github.event.release.body

Validation

Added changelog entry for PR #615 (which will be included next release) - make chlog-validate passes

Tested script outputs:

scripts/generate-version-bump-chlog.sh (used in ci-bump-component-versions.yaml) with fake upstream version v0.999.0:

change_type: enhancement
component: distributions
issues: [616]
note: Bump otel component versions from v0.154.0 to v0.999.0
subtext:

Tested changelog.md output of release-bump-version-pr in Act (using fake version + both chlog entries above)

<!-- This file is autogenerated. See CONTRIBUTING.md for instructions to add an entry. -->

<!-- next version -->

## 1.90.0

### Enhancements

- `distributions`: Bump otel component versions from v0.154.0 to v0.999.0 (#616)
- `docs`: Fix broken mssql link (#615)

<!-- previous-version -->

Tested output of release notes extraction script (from above changelog):

## 1.90.0

### Enhancements

- `distributions`: Bump otel component versions from v0.154.0 to v0.999.0 (#616)
- `docs`: Fix broken mssql link (#615)

…(deps) etc.

…g entry

agarvin-nr · 2026-07-09T18:41:29Z

+components:
+    - distributions
+    - distributions/nrdot-collector
+    - distributions/nrdot-collector-experimental
+    - docs
+    - examples


Adding this list to the config enforces that only these components may be added to each entry. If this is too restrictive, we could instead omit this section entirely (then users would still be mandated to add some "component" to their changelog, but would be free to choose whatever.)

agarvin-nr · 2026-07-09T21:57:22Z

@@ -0,0 +1,31 @@
+#!/bin/bash


I've had a few near-misses (from copy-paste or Claude) with GitHub Actions commit hashes being pinned to versions differing from the rest of the repo. I made this script to try and catch that more reliably, and I thought it might be nice for CI.

Examples of it working: Failing run from this PR and successful run after I fixed it

…r rules

…notes

agarvin-nr · 2026-07-10T18:34:47Z

              echo "Updated PR #$pr_number"
            else
-              echo "Creating new PR..."
+              echo "Creating new draft PR..."


chloggen mandates that there is at least one value entered into the issues field of each entry, which is meant to represent either an issue number (which we don't use) or pull request number.

For our auto-generated PRs, we cannot generate a passing changelog before we have a PR number, which means we must create a PR beforehand. This leads to the following issue:

This workflow opens a PR

CI runs against initial PR and fails

This workflow adds changelog entry

CI runs against workflow and passes

The CI run in step 2 will always fail, either because of the lack of changelog, or because it was cancelled by the CI run at 4. I don't think this would affect the release process, but my idea here was to mark it as a draft PR here, then mark it as 'ready' after the changelog is added so we don't get emailed until it's ready.

kb-newrelic · 2026-07-10T20:39:07Z

@@ -0,0 +1,14 @@
+# Use this changelog template to create an entry for release notes.
+
+# One of 'breaking', 'deprecation', 'new_component', 'enhancement', 'bug_fix'


It would be ideal if we had control over the categories and could use our existing labels like 'Features'. Eventually we'll also want to inject the changes into the metadata like we do for the host use case.

I think it's worth seeing if we can extend and/or configure chloggen somehow to adjust this behavior. One solution might also be wrapping it and have a postprocessor adjust the output?
If it gets too complicated, we can skip it for now, but a plan how we can get to that state would be great.

If the template is essentially fixed to use the terminology OTel has established, than we can probably live with just relabelling it in the changelog template, would just be ideal if we don't have that translation layer, so that the chloggen files already use our terminology.

I had the same thought about trying to control these categories. I briefly looked at trying to configure these values, and unfortunately it looks like the change types are hard-coded.

I agree that it would be much nicer to have the actual section names reflected in the changelog entries though. I can look into adding an intermediary processor that sits in between the changelog .yamls and chloggen.

kb-newrelic · 2026-07-10T20:44:20Z

+env:
+  # Make sure to exit early if cache segment download times out after 2 minutes.
+  # We limit cache download as a whole to 5 minutes.
+  SEGMENT_DOWNLOAD_TIMEOUT_MINS: 2


curious what this is about? Is there some kind of link validation in chloggen?

That's a great question - I took most of this workflow from the components repo and missed this. I just did some research and found that it's an environment variable used to set cache download timeout in actions/cache. In this instance, it seems it's used to configure actions/setup-go (which uses the same cache mechanism via toolkit/cache.)

The default timeout is 10 minutes. I imagine this would be a lot more relevant for repos with bigger caches than releases (like our components repo or upstream contrib), but we're probably safe to remove this from here if need be.

kb-newrelic · 2026-07-10T20:47:47Z

+
+      - name: Validate ./.chloggen/*.yaml changes
+        run: |
+          make install-tools


chlog-validate should have install chloggen as a dependency and not require make install-tools beforehand or am I missing something?

You are correct, it shouldn't require make install-tools, I will remove it. A few of the other new make targets were missing the install dependency too, so I'll add those in.

kb-newrelic · 2026-07-10T20:53:32Z

+      - name: Generate changelog
+        id: chloggen
+        run: |
+          make install-tools


same as above, chlog-update should have install chloggen as a dependency

kb-newrelic · 2026-07-10T21:04:30Z

 	github.com/sergi/go-diff v1.3.1 // indirect
+	github.com/spf13/cobra v1.10.2 // indirect
+	github.com/spf13/pflag v1.0.10 // indirect
+	go.opentelemetry.io/build-tools/chloggen v0.30.0 // indirect


should probably be a direct dependency now?

Good catch! I forgot to go mod tidy this after adding chloggen, I'll do that.

… calls

agarvin-nr added 10 commits July 8, 2026 15:50

ci: add chloggen and workflows for changelog generation

e255c5c

chore: exclude check of config and template yaml

39a2f4b

chore: exempt additional prefixes

8da5316

chore: fix makefile and finish adding filename to make chlog-new

8b4e650

chore: add trailing newline after chlog next version marker

dd6d357

chore: add changelog entry to contributing md

14c2129

chore: relax restrictions on chlog-exempt prefixes to allow for chore…

d1786f3

…(deps) etc.

docs: slight reordering for doc clarity

be16fbe

chore: include docs changes to changelog

da9daf6

chore: add changelog entry on ci-bump-component-version

c11a324

agarvin-nr force-pushed the agarvin/chloggen branch from c124eb3 to c11a324 Compare July 8, 2026 22:50

agarvin-nr added 15 commits July 8, 2026 16:59

chore: automatically populate changelog on version bump pr

dd28897

chore: remove non-user-facing components from config and update readme

5e48672

chore: add github release token and change component distribution

ebabcc7

chore: fix extra echo issue and strip comments from version bump chlo…

e7bbd95

…g entry

chore: remove act exclusion from add_changelog_entry

caeff7e

chore: extract release notes and pass to goreleaser for release process

8bdfb7f

chore: remove unused changelog section

88ba11a

chore: add changelog entry for prs which predate these changes

6ca59ff

chore: simplify component selection while generating changelogs

48540d9

chore: tweak chloggen template

ef27ede

chore: re-add useful components

4d723fd

chore: strip emojis from changelogs

9c017be

chore: clarify chloggen component names

7b0c9f0

chore: add clarifying comment to template

6f00149

chore: remove comment reference to changelog-api.md

8f11844

agarvin-nr commented Jul 9, 2026

View reviewed changes

agarvin-nr added 3 commits July 9, 2026 11:53

chore: remove leftover unused code

b54bf54

chore: remove unnecessary changes

df4dd8e

chore: some small changes

e3b6185

agarvin-nr added 5 commits July 9, 2026 13:35

chore: make ci_bump_nrdot_version act-friendly

aea98a6

chore: install go for release-bump-version-pr script

14ffa03

chore: add check to validate gha hashes uniform (expect failure)

9e3f27d

chore: rename new test (still expect failure)

e6c1130

chore: fix misaligned commit hashes

0b541e3

agarvin-nr commented Jul 9, 2026

View reviewed changes

agarvin-nr added 10 commits July 9, 2026 15:26

chore: add clarifying comment

fb04183

chore: separate version bump chlog gen into script for testing

132475b

chore: chmod +x

1a360e8

chore: tiny formatting changes

25a2fa5

chore: remove [chore] from exempt since it is not allowed under linte…

610d771

…r rules

chore: expand on changelog debug helper message

c31d5f7

chore: create initial PR as draft before chlog entry is made

d8f52c6

chore: add trailing newline

09cb00f

chore: add validation step to generate version bump script

2778e75

chore: remove leading and trailing whitespace from extracted release …

ffff6fd

…notes

agarvin-nr commented Jul 10, 2026

View reviewed changes

chore: remove some irrelevant checklist items

46d1a61

agarvin-nr marked this pull request as ready for review July 10, 2026 18:42

agarvin-nr requested a review from a team as a code owner July 10, 2026 18:42

kb-newrelic reviewed Jul 10, 2026

View reviewed changes

kb-newrelic requested changes Jul 10, 2026

View reviewed changes

agarvin-nr added 2 commits July 10, 2026 14:10

chore: go mod tidy tools

e807a6c

chore: install chloggen as dependencies and remove make install-tools…

d046af3

… calls

		@@ -0,0 +1,14 @@
		# Use this changelog template to create an entry for release notes.

		# One of 'breaking', 'deprecation', 'new_component', 'enhancement', 'bug_fix'

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Summary

Release Flow

Validation

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