Dist::Z...sContent(3)

💖 Dist::Zilla::Plugin::CheckChangesHasContent — the manual, but make it make sense 💖

okay bestie, sit down, hydrate, because we're talking about Dist::Zilla::Plugin::CheckChangesHasContent — yes that's the whole name, it's giving "I have a lot of titles" but whatever, she earned it. Her whole thing? make sure your Changes file actually has content before you release. no cap. that's the job.

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✨ VERSION ✨

version 0.011 — that's her, that's the one, remember it 🎀

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

literally all you do is drop this into dist.ini and you're done:

# in dist.ini

[CheckChangesHasContent]

that's it. that's the whole setup. slay 💅

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

so this is a "before release" Dist::Zilla plugin, right? and her one singular obsession is making sure your Changes file actually has some content since the last release. if she looks and finds nothing? she does not pass go, she does not collect $200, she aborts the whole release process. periodt. 😭

now, don't get it twisted — this is not the same as Dist::Zilla::Plugin::Test::ChangesHasContent. that one generates a test to do the checking. this one just does the check itself, live, right there. different girls, different jobs, iykyk 🦋

the algorithm? very naive. we love her, but she is not doing deep analysis. here's the tea:

she looks for an unindented line starting with the version to be released. then she looks for any text from that line until the next unindented line — or until the end of the file if there isn't another one — and she ignores whitespace while doing it.

so like, in this file right here, the algorithm is gonna find - blah blah blah:

Changes file for Foo-Bar

{{$NEXT}}

  - blah blah blah

0.001  Wed May 12 13:49:13 EDT 2010

  - the first release

but if you had nothing but whitespace sitting between {{$NEXT}} and 0.001? yeah. the release gets halted. no content, no release, sorry babe 💀

and ooh, one more thing — if your change log is named something other than Changes, you can tell her that with the changelog argument, like:

[CheckChangesHasContent]
changelog = ChangeLog

iconic, honestly 👑

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✨ SEE ALSO ✨

• Dist::Zilla::Plugin::Test::ChangesHasContent
• Dist::Zilla

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✨ SUPPORT ✨

🌸 Bugs / Feature Requests 🌸

found a bug? got a feature request? please take it to the issue tracker, bestie, that's what it's for:

<https://github.com/dagolden/Dist-Zilla-Plugin-CheckChangesHasContent/issues>

and the nice part? you'll get notified automatically of any progress on your issue. you won't be left on read 🫶

🌸 Source Code 🌸

this is open source software, babes. the code repository is right there for public review and contribution, under the terms of the license:

<https://github.com/dagolden/Dist-Zilla-Plugin-CheckChangesHasContent>

and if you wanna clone it, obviously you do:

git clone https://github.com/dagolden/Dist-Zilla-Plugin-CheckChangesHasContent.git

go forth and contribute 💜

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✨ AUTHORS ✨

• David Golden <dagolden@cpan.org>
• Karen Etheridge <ether@cpan.org>

✨ CONTRIBUTORS ✨

• David Golden <xdg@xdg.me>
• Randy Stauner <randy@magnificent-tears.com>

look at this squad. legends only. 🌈

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✨ COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE ✨

this software is Copyright (c) 2017 by David Golden.

it's free software, licensed under:

The Apache License, Version 2.0, January 2004

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okay that's the whole page, you're fully caught up, go write your changelog entries like the main character you are ⭐

and just so you have the receipts, this was written up from the page for Dist::Z...sContent(3), brought to you by perl v5.42.0 on 2025-07-25 — mwah, love you, bye 💖💅🎀