Introduction

Conventional Changelog generates a CHANGELOG.md from your git metadata. You write commit messages that follow a convention — most commonly Conventional Commits — and the tooling parses that history, groups the commits into sections like Features and Bug Fixes, and links every entry back to its commit and release.

It is not a single package but a family of them: a command-line tool and JS API for the common case, the presets that encode each commit convention, and the smaller building blocks (a parser, a filter, a writer, a git client) that everything else is composed from.

New to Conventional Commits?

Start with The Complete Guide — it walks through the commit format and how to wire up a fully automated release pipeline with Commitlint, Commitizen, and simple-release.

Where to start

Generate a changelog

Reach for conventional-changelog — the full-featured CLI and JS API. Following the Angular convention? standard-changelog is the same tool with that preset built in.

Decide the next version

conventional-recommended-bump reads the commits since your last tag and tells you whether the next release is a major, minor, or patch.

Automating releases

Conventional Changelog handles the changelog and the version recommendation. To automate the whole release — bumping the version, tagging, and publishing — combine it with simple-release, or its ready-made GitHub Action, simple-release-action: version bumps, changelog generation, and releases with first-class monorepo support, built on this project.

And to keep the commit history itself clean, Commitlint lints messages against the convention, while Commitizen offers an interactive prompt for writing them.

All packages

Tools

Package	What it does
conventional-changelog	Generate a changelog from git metadata — CLI and JS API.
standard-changelog	conventional-changelog with the Angular preset built in.
conventional-recommended-bump	Recommend the next semver bump from your commits.

Presets

Package	What it does
conventional-changelog-conventionalcommits	The Conventional Commits preset.
conventional-changelog-angular	The Angular commit convention preset.

Building blocks

The lower-level packages the tools are composed from. You only need these when building custom release tooling.

Package	What it does
conventional-commits-parser	Parse raw commit messages into structured objects.
conventional-commits-filter	Drop reverted (and reverting) commits.
conventional-changelog-writer	Render parsed commits into changelog Markdown.
conventional-changelog-preset-loader	Resolve and load presets by name.
@conventional-changelog/git-client	Promise- and stream-based git client.
@conventional-changelog/template	Shared changelog template helpers.