Publish your first entry

Once a repository is connected, ChangelogPilot drafts a changelog entry from every pull request you merge. Publishing is a review step, not a writing task.

From merged PR to draft

When a pull request merges into your watched branch, ChangelogPilot reads it and writes a draft entry in plain English, aimed at the people who use your product rather than the people who built it. Drafts collect at the top of your repo dashboard — nothing is public yet. (For what goes into a draft and what gets filtered out, see How drafts are generated.)

Everyone on the repo with notifications enabled also gets a Changelog draft ready email, so a merged PR never sits unreviewed just because nobody had the dashboard open.

Review and edit

Open a draft to see the full entry: the text, the pull requests it came from (each links back to GitHub), and who has created, edited, or published it. From there you can:

Edit the text. Every entry has a markdown editor on its detail page — change emphasis, add context, or rewrite it entirely.
Archive it. If a merged PR is not something your users need to hear about, archive the draft. It never appears publicly, and you can restore it later if you change your mind.

Nothing publishes without your say-so, unless you have turned on auto-publish for the repo.

Approve and publish

There are two ways to publish a draft:

From the app. Press Publish on the draft's card or its detail page.
From the email. The draft-ready email includes a one-click Approve & publish link. It works without signing in, expires after 48 hours, and works once — the first person to click it publishes the entry, and anyone clicking later sees that it is already live.

What publishing does

Publishing puts the entry on your hosted changelog page at changelogpilot.com/c/your-owner/your-repo (or on your own domain, on Pro) with a stable link you can share. A few things worth knowing:

The date is when the work shipped. Entries are dated by the merge or tag that produced them, not by when you pressed Publish — so publishing an older draft doesn't jump it to the top of your changelog.
Feeds update straight away. The entry appears in your changelog's RSS and Atom feeds immediately.
Readers are emailed once. On Pro with reader subscriptions enabled, subscribed readers get an email for the entry — one email per entry, ever, even if you later edit or re-publish it.
Members get a confirmation. Repo members with notifications on receive a Changelog published email.

After publishing

You can still edit. Fix a typo or add a clarification from the entry's detail page; the public page shows the updated text, and the dashboard notes when an entry was updated after publishing.
You can archive. Archiving a published entry removes it from the public page (the entry and its history are kept). Restoring brings it back as a draft, and re-publishing it keeps its original URL.
History is permanent and paginated. Readers can scroll back through everything you have shipped. See Your changelog page for how the public page works.