Automating Versioning and Changelog in Flutter Projects

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Releasing your Flutter app? If you're still manually updating your pubspec.yaml version and hand-writing changelogs, there's a better way…

Releasing your Flutter app? If you're still manually updating your pubspec.yaml version and hand-writing changelogs, there's a better way. In this story, we'll explore how to automate versioning and changelog generation — making your release workflow clean, consistent, and reliable.

🤔 Why Automate Versioning & Changelogs?

Manual versioning and release notes are:

Prone to errors (missing version bump, inconsistent logs)
Time-consuming
Easy to forget during a late-night release

Automating this process ensures:

Semantic versioning is applied consistently
Changelogs are generated from real commits
Your pubspec.yaml and Git tags are always in sync
CI/CD pipelines stay clean

🧰 Tools You'll Need

We'll use the following tools:

Conventional Commits — to structure commit messages
semantic_version or standard-version — to auto-generate versions & changelogs
Git hooks / GitHub Actions / CI — to enforce commit formats
Optional: pubspec_version or custom scripts to update pubspec.yaml

🔧 Step 1: Use Conventional Commits

First, standardize your commit messages:

Examples:

feat: add dark mode toggle
fix: resolve crash on profile page
chore: update dependencies

These keywords help tools understand what kind of version bump is needed (major/minor/patch).

⚙️ Step 2: Install `standard-version` (Node)

Though not Dart-specific, standard-version works great for Flutter repos:

npm install --save-dev standard-version

Then, add this to your package.json scripts:

"scripts": {
  "release": "standard-version"
}

Running npm run release will:

Analyze commits
Bump the version (e.g., 1.0.0 → 1.1.0)
Generate or update the CHANGELOG.md
Create a Git tag

Want to commit & push automatically? Add --commit-all --push --tag options.

🗂️ Step 3: Sync with pubspec.yaml

You can use a Dart CLI tool like pubspec_version:

Install globally:

dart pub global activate pubspec_version

Update the version based on Git tag:

pubspec_version from-git

You can combine this with a shell script:

npm run release
pubspec_version from-git
git add pubspec.yaml
git commit -m "chore(pubspec): bump version"
git push

⚙️ Optional: Automate with GitHub Actions

Set up .github/workflows/release.yml:

name: Auto Release
on:
  push:
    branches: [main]
jobs:
  release:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v3
    - name: Use Node.js
      uses: actions/setup-node@v3
      with:
        node-version: '18'
    - name: Install dependencies
      run: npm install
    - name: Bump version and generate changelog
      run: npm run release
    - name: Commit updated changelog
      run: |
        git config user.name "GitHub Actions"
        git config user.email "actions@github.com"
        git add .
        git commit -m "chore(release): update changelog"
        git push --follow-tags

✨ Bonus: Git Hooks with Husky

Want to ensure your commits follow the rules locally?

npx husky-init && npm install
npx husky add .husky/commit-msg 'npx --no -- commitlint --edit "$1"'

Then install commitlint to enforce the conventional commit format.

✅ Conclusion

By automating versioning and changelogs, you remove human error from your release process. Flutter apps benefit massively from this clarity — especially in collaborative teams and CI/CD environments.

With a few commands and some simple automation, your releases become:

Faster ⚡
Cleaner 🧼
More reliable ✅

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