Rylees CLI

An LLM-assisted release-note generator and publisher. rylees reads the diff between two points in your Git history, asks an LLM to draft a release note in your project's configured tone, lets you review or edit it, and publishes it to the Rylees backend.

Requirements

• Python 3.12 or newer
• A Git repository to generate notes from
• A Rylees API token and project token (from the developer console)
• An OpenAI API key

Installation

The CLI is a standard PEP 517 package. Install it from the src/cli directory.

Using a virtual environment (recommended)

cd src/cli
python3.12 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install .

For development, install in editable mode with the dev dependencies:

pip install -e ".[dev]"

Using uv

cd src/cli
uv venv
uv pip install -e ".[dev]"

Once installed, the rylees command is available on your PATH (inside the activated environment):

rylees --version

Configuration

rylees reads configuration from a .env file in your current working directory (it searches upward from the cwd, not from the CLI's install location). Copy the bundled example and fill in your values:

cp .env.example .env

If a required variable is missing, the CLI exits with an error naming the variable.

Usage

Run rylees from the root of the Git repository you want to generate notes for.

rylees generate --start <ref> [options]

Options

Only one of --major, --minor, --patch may be set. If none is given, --minor is assumed.

Examples

Generate a note for the changes between two tags and review it interactively:

rylees generate --start v1.2.0 --end v1.3.0 --minor

Generate from a range of commits instead of tags:

rylees generate --type commit --start a1b2c3d --end HEAD

Generate and publish a major release without manual review (use with care — this skips human review and prints a warning to stderr):

rylees generate --start v1.0.0 --major --publish

Interactive review (HITL)

Without --publish, the CLI prints the generated draft and prompts for an action:

[A] Accept and publish   [R] Regenerate     [E] Edit

• A — publish the current draft to the Rylees backend.
• R — regenerate a fresh draft from the same diff.
• E — open the draft in your editor ($EDITOR, default nano), then return to the prompt with your edits.

On a successful publish, the CLI prints the resulting status and version.

How it works

1. Loads and validates configuration from .env.
2. Fetches the project's configuration (tone, temperature) from the Rylees API.
3. Opens the local Git repository and computes the diff between --start and --end.
4. Strips noise (binary and lock-file diffs) and truncates the diff to fit the LLM context window.
5. Generates a release-note draft in the project's configured tonality.
6. Lets you review, regenerate, or edit the draft — then publishes it.

Development

Run the test suite from src/cli:

pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest