# Releases

## What is Releases?

Releases is a Sphinx extension designed to help you keep a source control friendly, merge friendly changelog file & turn it into useful, human readable HTML output.

Specifically:

- The source format (kept in your Sphinx tree as `changelog.rst`) is a stream-like timeline that plays well with source control & only requires one entry per change (even for changes that exist in multiple release lines).
- The output (when you have the extension installed and run your Sphinx build command) is a traditional looking changelog page with a section for every release; multi-release issues are copied automatically into each release.
- By default, feature and support issues are only displayed under feature releases, and bugs are only displayed under bugfix releases. This can be overridden on a per-issue basis.

Some background on why this tool was created can be found in this blog post.

For more documentation, including detailed installation and usage information, please see http://releases.readthedocs.org.

Note

You can install the development version via `pip install releases==dev`.

## Table of Contents

- Concepts
  - Issue and release types
  - Release organization
- Usage
  - Optional styling additions
- Changelog