Two More GitHub Actions: Stale Branch Cleaner + Changelog Generator

#githubactions #devops #productivity #opensource

Shipped two more GitHub Actions today. Quick overview of both.

🧹 Stale Branch Cleaner

You know that repo with 47 branches, half of which were "temporary" six months ago? This fixes that.

name: Branch Cleanup
on:
  schedule:
    - cron: '0 9 * * 1'  # Every Monday
jobs:
  cleanup:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: ollieb89/stale-branch-cleaner@v1
        with:
          stale-days: '90'
          dry-run: 'true'
          create-issue: 'true'

It scans all branches, finds ones with no commits in 90+ days, and creates a GitHub Issue with a report table. Set dry-run: false when you're ready to auto-delete.

Smart exclusions: main, master, develop, release/*, and hotfix/* are always protected.

→ Source

📝 Changelog Generator

If you use conventional commits (feat:, fix:, docs:), this generates a grouped changelog automatically.

- uses: actions/checkout@v4
  with:
    fetch-depth: 0
- uses: ollieb89/changelog-generator@v1

Output:

## Unreleased (2026-03-19)

### 🚀 Features
- **auth:** add OAuth2 support (a1b2c3d)

### 🐛 Bug Fixes
- **api:** fix rate limit handling (i7j8k9l)

### ⚠️ Breaking Changes
- remove deprecated v1 endpoints (m0n1o2p)

Breaking changes get their own section. Everything is emoji-categorized and commit-linked.

→ Source

The Full Toolkit (6 Actions)

Action	What It Does
workflow-guardian	Lint workflows for security
test-results-reporter	Aggregate test results
pr-size-labeler	Label PRs by diff size
stale-branch-cleaner	Clean up old branches
changelog-generator	Auto-generate changelogs
Workflow Linter	VS Code extension