Generating Release Notes with Bamboo?

Question

I am using Bamboo to build a small product for release.  It currently builds everything using ant, and packs it into a zip file, who's name has the major-minor versions (taken from build.properties variables) and the build number (from bamboo, passed into ant), so you get an artifact like this:  FooProduct-v1.1b341.zip.  Which is great.

However, I'm trying to figure out how I can create a RELEASE-NOTES.txt (or similar) file during the build process, that will be added into the zip file, that contains the same version and build numbers, and ideally also has a changelog based on the commits and Jira issues related to the bamboo build (and the history of the project's build).

I'm sure you've seen similar release notes or change log files with most of your favorite software.  However, I can't seem to figure out any easy way, using Bamboo, Ant or both, to make this happen.

This seems like basic functionality for a build system, so hopefully I'm just missing something simple...

Mirza Jahangir · Answer

i know its very late, but i am answering for others who might come here for solution.

you can you bamboo rest api to get jira issues related to build and generate release note file using markdown format.

{bamboohost}/rest/api/latest/result/{key}.json?expand=changes.change.file,jiraIssues

key is ${bamboo.planKey}-${bamboo.buildNumber}

Chad Smith3 · Answer

Devon is asking to generate release notes through Bamboo, not Jira. Jira's release notes show tickets that were tagged for a release, regardless of their state (opened, implemented, closed, etc.).

In Bamboo's web interface, you can view Related JIRA Issues. This list is created by parsing commit messages for JIRA tickets such as MYPROJ-76 (assuming the JIRA plugin is enabled). Unlike JIRA, it would know nothing about a ticket that was closed with no changes unless their ticket number somehow got committed.

So it seems to get a complete picture of what has gone into a release – from things that were closed with no code change (only JIRA knows about these), to things that were committed noting a JIRA ticket that belongs in a different release (only Bamboo knows about these) – you need some combination of the two.

In any case, my team also needs to somehow obtain this "Related JIRA Issues" list from Bamboo (and JIRA's release notes) during a build to save in a release notes file.

Midori · Answer

As far as I know, JIRA's standard release notes are not exposed via the JIRA REST API, so you won't be able to get that in an Ant build script.

As an alternative solution, you may want to use the JIRA PDF View Plugin to generate your release notes documents. Besides having a document looking more professional than a plain text file, the nicety in this is that you can get the PDF by accessing the URL that generates it. So, in your Ant script, use the get task and voila!

jira-release-notes-pdf.png