Thanks for opening your first issue at git-cliff! Be sure to follow the issue template! ⛰️

Hello! Thanks for the issue and sorry for the delayed response.

I have implemented this as a configuration option (always_render) here: #859

Can you build from source and test it out if you are still interested? 🐻

Hi @orhun, thanks for the reply and the change.

I built this branch and set the always_render = true option, and played around with this a bit. I'm a bit stuck with getting what I want to happen, and I'm not sure I fully understand what is happening.

The relevant portion of my body template looks like this now:

{% if version %}
    ## [{{ version | trim_start_matches(pat="v") }}] - {{ timestamp | date(format="%Y-%m-%d") }}
{% else %}
    ## [unreleased]
{% endif %}

{% if commits | length == 0 -%}
No significant changes.

{% else -%}
{% for group, commits in commits | group_by(attribute="group") -%}
    ### {{ group | upper_first }}
    etc.
{% endfor %}
{%- endif %}

If I run git-cliff when there are zero contributing commits at all (such as using --include-path 'nonexistent/path') then it sort of appears to work as expected:

$ git-cliff --repository ../../ --include-path 'nonexistent/path' --tag '10.6.0' --unreleased
## [unreleased]


No significant changes.

I say "sort of" because the version didn't get set, and verifying with --context I can see version: null, commits: [].

If I run git-cliff when there are contributing commits, then I get the contributing commits and the version is working correctly, however I still have version: null in context, and so the empty section is also output, except the previous context is populated:

$ git-cliff --repository ../../ --include-path 'real/path' --tag '10.6.0' --unreleased
## [unreleased]


No significant changes.


## [10.6.0] - 2024-09-18


### ✨ Features

Would I need to extend my condition to also check if previous.commits | length == 0 too? Just wanted to check if I'm going off on a tangent before I actually go off on one.

Thanks again!

Thanks for testing it! I pushed a new commit to that branch for fixing those cases, can you check again? 👀

Btw I renamed it to render_always, it sounded more correct.

Oops closed by accident, feel free to let me know if there are issues. Going to include it in the next release now :)