Getting started

Basic usage

The command interface is hopefully quite intuitive. The following is a sample session:

$ histofile new "Add support for cake baking"
$ histofile new "Removed support for window cleaning"
$ histofile list
2016-02-10T12:03:00     Add support for cake baking
2016-02-10T12:03:05     Removed support for window cleaning
$ histofile update --output - 0.2.0 NEWS.rst
<fancy new NEWS.rst>
$ histofile update 0.2.0 NEWS.rst
<NEWS.rst is updated in place>

Help on individual subcommands is available via histofile <subcommand> --help or in the Usage document.

Configuration

histofile ships with what the maintainer hopes are reasonable defaults, but can be configured in various ways.

histofile will read argument defaults from .histofile.json or the file pointed to by HISTOFILE_CONFIG. The file should be a valid JSON document, and can contain the following items:

Variable	Type	Description
directory	str	The directory to read and write NEWS entries to
filename	str	The filename to use as the NEWS file
keep	bool	Whether to keep the entries after writing updates
template_name	str	The template set used to render the NEWS file

For example, a configuration file could contain the following:

{
    "directory": "/out/of/tree/storage",
    "filename": "awful_name.md"
}