Issue / PR descriptions

By default, ReleaseJet renders one bullet per issue or PR with just the title. The description field lets you opt in to also showing a cleaned excerpt of the body underneath.

description: extract

Available since 1.14.0. The default is none, so existing configs render exactly as they did before.

The three modes

What extract cleans

Real-world issue and PR bodies are messy. The extractor handles the common cases so you don't end up with a wall of template text in your release notes:

• HTML comment templates (<!-- ... -->) — stripped from the top, including multi-comment issue templates.
• Leading ATX headers (# Title, ## Description, etc.) — skipped.
• Leading blockquote lines (copy-pasted Slack or email quotes) — skipped.
• Internal whitespace — collapsed to single spaces; CRLF normalised to LF.
• Long paragraphs — truncated at the last word boundary (≤199 chars) with a single ….
• Empty / heading-only / comment-only bodies — render the title with no excerpt line and no placeholder.

Only the first paragraph (up to the next blank line) is taken — code blocks, screenshots, and follow-up details further down the body are left out of the notes.

Example

Issue body:

<!-- Bug template -->
## Description

Users were redirected to /login instead of their target after SSO callback,
so the deep link was lost completely on every sign-in attempt regardless of
provider.

With description: none (default):

- Fix login redirect bug (#142)

With description: extract:

- Fix login redirect bug (#142)
  - Users were redirected to /login instead of their target after SSO callback, so the deep link was lost completely on every sign-in attempt regardless of…

Provider coverage

GitLab merge-request support is not yet implemented in the CLI; once it lands, descriptions will be picked up automatically.

Tips

• Keep the first paragraph of an issue or PR body short and self-contained — that's what ends up in the notes. Detail, repro steps, and screenshots can live further down without affecting the excerpt.
• If your team uses an issue template with a ## Description header, you don't need to remove it before closing — the extractor skips leading headers automatically.
• description: extract is purely additive: titles still show. If a body is empty or boilerplate-only, the bullet falls back to title-only with no empty placeholder.

Next steps

• Full reference: description in the configuration schema.
• Curious about the AI mode? See Pro overview.