Gitlab Sample Script to generate Release Notes(CHANGELOG.md) autotmatically as part of the CI/CD pipeline

Very Common Usecase is genrate Release Notes(CHANGELOG.md) automatically. Below use case here has two jobs underr release-creation stage. One to generate CHANGELOG.md and other to generate release automatically. i.e Whenever a tag is created on any project a release with corresponding release notes , artifacts are generated automatically.

stages:
  - build
  - .......
  - release-creation


prepare:
  stage: release-creation
  allow_failure: true
  image:
    name: docker.repo.frg.tech/alpine/git:latest
    entrypoint: [""]
  script:
    - echo RELEASE_TAG=$CI_COMMIT_TAG >> variables.env
    - echo '## Changelog' >> CHANGELOG.md
    - git tag -l -n9 $CI_COMMIT_TAG >> CHANGELOG.md
    - echo '## Commits' >> CHANGELOG.md 
    - git log --pretty="- %s (%h)" $(git tag --sort=-creatordate | head -2)...$(git tag --sort=-creatordate | head -1) >> CHANGELOG.md
    - echo '## Merges' >> CHANGELOG.md 
    - git log --merges --pretty="- %s (%h)" $(git tag --sort=-creatordate | head -2)...$(git tag --sort=-creatordate | head -1) >> CHANGELOG.md
    - echo '## AUTHORS' >> CHANGELOG.md
    - git log --pretty="- %an%n- %cn" $(git tag --sort=-creatordate | head -2)...$(git tag --sort=-creatordate | head -1) | sort | uniq >> CHANGELOG.md
  artifacts:
    paths:
      - CHANGELOG.md
  only:
    - tags

release_creation:
  stage: release-creation
  allow_failure: true
  image: docker.repo.frg.tech/gitlab-org/release-cli:latest  
  only:
    - tags
  needs:
    - job: prepare
      artifacts: true
  artifacts:
    paths:
    - CHANGELOG.md
    expire_in: never
  release:
    name: $CI_COMMIT_TAG
    description: CHANGELOG.md
    tag_name: $CI_COMMIT_TAG 

Important point to note here is - we are generate CHANGELOG,md and during release , pls pay attention to the description where we are directly specificying the CHANGELOG.md file as the descriptions

  release:
    name: $CI_COMMIT_TAG    
    description: CHANGELOG.md

Notes:

Release notes description from official documentation Every release has a description. You can add any text you like, but we recommend including a changelog to describe the content of your release. This helps users quickly scan the differences between each release you publish.

This has the following behavior of the description filed if the description contains spaces between words: it is treated as a string, if the description is a single word and is a file or a symlink to a file inside $CI_PROJECT_DIR: the file's contents will be read as the release description, if the description is a single word and is a file or a symlink to a file outside $CI_PROJECT_DIR, or if the target file does not exist: it is treated as a string.

Please see this link for more details