# Release Notes

You can edit the release notes to highlight a new feature being added to a given release. The release notes are templatized with Jinja and are generated at release time.

## How do I edit the release notes

To edit the release notes you need to look in doc/topics/releases/templates for your given release and edit the template. Do not edit the release note files in doc/topics/releases/, as this will be written over with the content in the template file. For example, if you want to add content to the 3006.0 release notes you would edit the doc/topics/releases/templates/3006.0.md.template file. Do not edit the changelog portion of the template file, since that is auto generated with the content generated for the changelog for each release.

## How to generate the release notes

This step is only used when we need to generate the release notes before releasing. You should NOT need to run these steps as they are ran in the pipeline, but this is documented so you can test your changes to the release notes template.

To generate the release notes requires the tools command. The instructions below will detail how to install and use tools.

### Installing tools

To view the output the release notes will produce before generating them you can run tools in draft mode:

    tools changelog update-release-notes --draft

To generate the release notes just remove the --draft argument:

    tools changelog update-release-notes

To specify a specific Salt version you add that version as an argument:

    tools changelog update-release-notes 3006.0

To only generate the template for a new release

    tools changelog update-release-notes --template-only