Release notes templates: 8 copy-paste formats for teams that ship from GitHub

A release notes document template is a skeleton you fill in once per version. The heading set never changes; only the lines under it do. That is the point: a reader who learns the shape once can scan it in five seconds every release, and scanning is the only way a release note gets read twice.

The version line does more work than it looks like. Semantic Versioning 2.0.0 states the contract precisely: increment MAJOR when you make incompatible API changes, MINOR when you add functionality in a backward compatible manner, and PATCH when you make backward compatible bug fixes. Putting the release type on line two tells a reader whether to keep reading before they read anything else.

The change headings use the vocabulary Keep a Changelog standardized, which lists its types of changes as Added, Changed, Deprecated, Removed, Fixed and Security. Use those words rather than inventing a set, because most of your readers already know what belongs under each one.

Under Semantic Versioning a PATCH release contains backward compatible bug fixes only. If that is true, say so on the first line and let the reader stop reading. A four-line sample release note a maintainer will actually write beats a full template that gets skipped because it demands a summary paragraph for a one-character fix.

Two lines carry the weight: the upgrade command and the compare link. The cost of this format is that it assumes trust, so if your last three patch releases broke something, use the standard template until that stops being true.

This is the product release notes template that goes in an in-app what's new panel, an email, or a public updates page. Drop the tag, the release type and the pull request numbers. Lead with what a person can now do that they could not do yesterday, and say where in the interface to find it.

Keep it to two or three items per update, one sentence on the change and one on why it matters. If you shipped eleven things, pick the three a customer would notice and leave the rest in the developer-facing note.

The cost of this format is precision. Anyone integrating against you cannot work from it, so if you have both audiences you publish both: this note for users, and one of the engineering templates for the people reading your API.

Stripe's public API changelog shows the pattern worth copying. Entries are versioned by date and API version name, grouped under product headings such as Billing and invoicing or Payments, and every entry carries an explicit Breaking change column marked Breaking or Non-breaking. The reader never has to infer whether a change affects them, which is the single most valuable property an API release note can have.

Semantic Versioning supplies the other half. Its own guidance on deprecation says that when you deprecate part of your public API you should update your documentation and issue a new minor release with the deprecation in place, keeping at least one minor release containing the deprecation before removing the functionality in a subsequent major release. So your Deprecated section names a removal version, not just the fact of deprecation.

Number the breaking changes and give each one a before, an after, a why and a migration. The numbering lets support write 'breaking change 2' in a ticket and lets you link a specific anchor from an error message.

Apple's App Store Connect reference documents the What's New in This Version field as 'A description of the changes in this version of the app, such as new features, UI improvements, or bug fixes. Limited to 4000 characters.' Apple also states that the property is not available for the first version of an app but is required for all subsequent versions, and that it can be localized.

Google Play is far tighter. The Play Console help page on preparing and rolling out a release states that you can enter release notes using up to 500 Unicode characters per language, and that language tags go on separate lines from the notes, wrapping each translation in a tag such as en-US.

Write the Play version first, inside 500 characters, then expand it for Apple. Doing it the other way round means editing down under a character counter, per language, on submission day. App release notes are also the one place a support address earns its line.

This deployment release notes template lives in a deploy channel, a deploy tool, or a wiki page, and it answers three questions: what changed, what could break, and how to undo it. If a reader can find the rollback command in under five seconds, the template is doing its job.

Include the commit hash as well as the version. During an incident the person reading this is trying to diff two points in git history, and a tag is one lookup away from useful while the commit is zero. The feature flag line matters for the same reason: a change behind a flag at 10 percent is a different incident from the same change at 100 percent.

The cost is that this gets written at deploy time, when everyone wants to go home. Keep it short enough that filling it in is faster than arguing about whether to fill it in.

Two columns do the work in this agile release notes template: the issue key and what a user notices. The key keeps it traceable back to the tracker, and the impact column forces a translation out of tracker language. A row whose impact reads 'nothing, internal only' is honest and useful, because it stops someone asking about it three weeks later.

Jira can generate the first draft. Atlassian's Jira Cloud documentation describes a release notes action on a version: open Releases, select the version, choose Release notes, pick your formatting options, then copy the result as markdown or HTML, or save it into the version's related work section. Atlassian notes one limitation, that notes containing panels, dates, expand sections or statuses cannot be copied as markdown. A Create in Confluence path produces a draft Confluence page prefilled from the version.

Jira Data Center works differently. Atlassian's admin documentation says the release notes contain all issues in the project marked with a specific Fix For version, and that the plain text and HTML layouts render from Velocity templates named releasenotes-text.vm and releasenotes-html.vm, which you can copy and customize. Either way the output is a list of issue keys and summaries: a starting point, with the impact column still yours to write.

If you searched for a release notes template for GitHub, this is the one that goes in the release body itself. GitHub's own automatically generated notes produce a list of merged pull requests, a list of contributors to the release, and a link to a full changelog. This template keeps that shape and adds the two things no generator infers: a Breaking section pinned to the top, and an upgrade block containing the actual command.

Keep the per-line contributor attribution. It costs one line per entry and it is a meaningful part of why a first-time contributor opens a second pull request. Keep the compare link too, because anyone who wants the raw git history looks for it there first.

This is the release notes document, not the announcement. The post you write for LinkedIn, Discord or Hacker News about the same release is a different artifact with a different structure, and it is covered separately in our GitHub release announcement templates.

The most common failure is not length, it is abstraction. A line describing what you did to the code is worthless to a reader who has never seen the code. Rewrite it to start from something the reader observes, then attach the pull request number for anyone who wants the detail.

The second failure is 'various bug fixes and improvements'. It tells a reader nobody checked whether this release contained anything they care about, and after two or three of those they stop opening your notes.

A release notes format only pays off if it is the same one every release, so the file needs one canonical home. Keep it in the repository next to the code; pasting it into Word, Google Docs or a Confluence page for review is fine, because these headings survive a paste intact.

Generators handle the mechanical half well: the merged pull request list, the contributor list, the compare link, and a version bump derived from commit messages or change files. Every practical way to do that on GitHub is covered in our guide to automating release notes on GitHub, linked below.

What no generator writes is the summary, the breaking-change migration, the known issues and the upgrade command. That is what the template is for: a fixed set of fields a human has to fill, in the same order every time, so filling them takes four minutes instead of forty.

The other repeating job starts after the note is published, when the same content gets rewritten by hand for every channel your team posts to. Ship 2 Post watches your repository through its GitHub App for releases, tags, merged pull requests and deployments, drafts channel-native variants in a brand voice you configure, and holds them in a review queue until you approve each one. It publishes to 14 destinations and keeps an audit trail back to the source signal. There is a free plan and no credit card.