Turn your merged pull requests into audience-ready release notes technical, customer-facing, and product, from a single source of truth, without the hallucinations.
Chartula is a cross-platform .NET CLI that reads the pull requests behind a release and produces multiple, audience-tailored changelogs at once. It grounds every generated line against the actual facts of your PRs, so the output reads well and stays true to what really changed.
Chartula (Latin) - "a small document, a little note". Which is exactly what a changelog entry is.
Phase 1 is complete. The pipeline runs end to end on a real repository, from reading pull requests to writing CHANGELOG.md, changelog.json and GitHub release notes.
It is not published yet, so there is no dotnet tool install and no prebuilt binary - both land in phase 3.
To try it today, build it from source.
See the Roadmap for what ships when.
Release communication usually forces a trade-off between three imperfect options.
Developer-oriented changelogs read cleanly for engineers, but leave customers guessing what actually changed for them.
Polished customer-facing release notes look great, but tend to live outside your repository, behind hosting and subscriptions.
Automated summaries can turn thin commit messages into confident-sounding claims nobody can fully trust.
Chartula aims at the gap in the middle: one pipeline, run from your own repo, that turns the same set of pull requests into several audience-specific outputs and checks each one against the facts before it ships.
🎯 PR-level, not commit-spam. Changes are summarized per merged pull request, not per raw commit.
👥 Multi-audience from one source. Technical, customer, and product-manager versions are rendered from a single structured fact base, so they can never contradict each other.
🔒 Grounded, not guessed. An LLM only rephrases facts that are already established; it never decides what happened. A faithfulness check flags anything in the output that isn't backed by the facts.
💸 Runs in your repo, costs you nothing.
Ships as a dotnet tool / standalone binary. No hosting, no subscriptions - you bring your own model key.
⚙️ Configuration as code.
Everything is driven by a small chartula.yaml in your repository. Sensible defaults; grows only when you want it to.
Not yet published.
dotnet tool install -g Chartulalands with the first release.
Until then, build it from source. You need the .NET 10 SDK.
git clone https://github.com/goldbarth/chartula.git
cd chartula
dotnet build Chartula.slnx -c ReleaseThe CLI is then at src/Chartula.Cli/bin/Release/net10.0/chartula.
Chartula needs a release tag that exists in your repository and the repository to read pull requests from.
# Show what would be produced, without writing anything
chartula preview --tag v1.2.0 --repo owner/name
# Produce the outputs and write them
chartula generate --tag v1.2.0 --repo owner/nameTwo environment variables carry the credentials, and neither is ever read from a config file:
| Variable | Used for |
|---|---|
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY |
The model that rephrases the facts. |
GITHUB_TOKEN |
Reading pull requests and writing release notes. |
generate writes three outputs:
CHANGELOG.md- the technical rendering, prepended to your existing file.changelog.json- every audience text plus the fact base behind them, in a documented, stable format.- GitHub release notes - the technical rendering, attached to the release for the tag.
Every run ends with a summary of what it did and what it cost in tokens. See Run metrics for how to read it.
Chartula works out of the box.
A chartula.yaml in your repository root only exists to refine that default behavior, and every setting can also be given as an environment variable.
chartula.example.yaml is a commented starting point - copy it and uncomment only what you need.
Full options are documented (not pre-filled) in Configuration, so beginners aren't overwhelmed and advanced users can go deep.
| Document | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Architecture | The layering, the pipeline, and the choices behind them. |
| Configuration | Every chartula.yaml section and its defaults. |
changelog.json format |
The stable output schema other tools build on. |
| Run metrics | Reading a run's cost, and judging whether the thorough check earns it. |
| Test fixtures | How the pipeline is tested without spending tokens. |
| Contributing | Working on Chartula. |
Development is staged so that each phase is useful on its own, not a fragment waiting on the next.
The CLI running locally on a repo: PR-level collection, deterministic curation with label rules, the grounded fact base, audience-specific rendering, the faithfulness check with a lightweight review step, and stable repo outputs (CHANGELOG.md, changelog.json, GitHub release notes).
Configuration and observability from day one.
Webhook output for Discord/Slack/Teams, a JavaScript widget over changelog.json, and an RSS feed as a low-cost static extra.
A GitHub Action as a thin wrapper around the CLI, publication as a dotnet tool on NuGet, and multi-OS binaries via CI.
See the project board for detailed tasks.
These have been considered deliberately and set aside - not forgotten. They may be revisited if there's real demand, so there's no need to open an issue proposing them from scratch.
- Email / SMS / WhatsApp broadcast. Requires a subscriber list and a paid delivery service, which breaks Chartula's "runs in your repo, costs you nothing" model. A "bring your own service" hook is the likely path instead.
- Read analytics & feedback buttons (👍/👎, read counts). These need a server to collect and store events - again, hosted infrastructure Chartula intentionally avoids.
- Scripting-based configuration (e.g. Lua). Chartula's config is declarative by nature; embedding a scripting runtime would add weight for little gain - unless config ever needs real logic, at which point this becomes worth revisiting.
Contributions are welcome - bug reports, ideas, documentation fixes, and code. Please read CONTRIBUTING.md and the Code of Conduct before opening an issue or pull request.
Licensed under the MIT License. © 2026 Felix Wahl.