Direct bump with changelog creation not possible using semver2, custom tag_format and prerelease option

Description

When using a custom tag_format like ${major}.${minor}-${patch}${prerelease} with semver2 the changelog cannot be create directly using cz bump --prerelase rc with update_changelog_on_bump = true. Only generating the changelog manually using cz ch lets the bump succeed.

The error occurse in a bump chain 0.0.1 → 0.0.2 → 0.0.3-rc.0 → 0.0.3-rc.1

Furthermore, using prereleases, cz changelog always throw warnings like:

Invalid version tag: '0.0-2rc.0' does not match any configured tag format

It seems that the git tag is not parsed correctly when using custom tag_format and semver2.

See a szenario in steps to reproduce.

Steps to reproduce

Initialize git project and place cz configuration:

git init .
cat << EOF | tee cz.toml
[tool.commitizen]
name = "cz_conventional_commits"
tag_format = "\${major}.\${minor}-\${patch}\${prerelease}"
version_scheme = "semver2"
version = "0.0.1"
update_changelog_on_bump = true
EOF

Create a first commit

echo "# test" | tee README.md
git add README.md cz.toml
git commit -m "fix: Add readme file"

Bump a prerelease

cz bump --prerelease rc --yes

Add changes, commit and create changelog

echo "Some changes" | tee -a README.md
git add README.md
git commit -m "fix: Add changes to readme file"

Try to bump another prerelease version (failing)

cz bump --prerelease rc --yes

Generate changelog (succeeding with warning)

cz changelog

Try to bump prerelease version again (succeeding)

cz bump --prerelease rc

Current behavior

Bumping without prior changelog generation fails with:

Invalid version tag: '0.0-2rc.0' does not match any configured tag format

Only if the changelog is created before bumping (so that # Unreleased heading appears) let's you create a bump.

Furthermore commitizen does not recognize custom tags with prerelease part correctly, resulting in warnings using cz changelog like:

Invalid version tag: '0.0-2rc.1' does not match any configured tag format
Invalid version tag: '0.0-2rc.0' does not match any configured tag format

Desired behavior

Changelog generation shall recognize the tags using custom tag_format with ${prerelease}
Bumping with changelog creation shall succeed without generating changelog before

Screenshots

n/a

Environment

Commitizen Version: 4.9.1
Python Version: 3.9.21 (main, Aug 19 2025, 00:00:00)
[GCC 11.5.0 20240719 (Red Hat 11.5.0-5)]
Operating System: Linux

Triage from #1964: Still valid. The interaction between custom tag_format containing ${prerelease}, version_scheme = "semver2", and cz bump --prerelease produces 0.0-2rc.0 instead of the expected tag, and the changelog parser then can't recognise it. Likely shares a root cause with #1615 — needs investigation in commitizen/tags.py::normalize_tag.

Verification update (re #1964)

Reproduced against current master (4.15.1):

Config: tag_format = "${major}.${minor}-${patch}${prerelease}", version_scheme = "semver2", version = "0.0.1".

After first cz bump --prerelease rc --yes:

git tag --list
0.0-2rc.0

The tag is malformed (note 0.0-2 instead of 0.0.2). Second cz bump --prerelease rc --yes fails:

Invalid version tag: '0.0-2rc.0' does not match any configured tag format
No tag found to do an incremental changelog
(exit 16)

cz changelog --dry-run also warns about the same invalid tag.

Verdict: STILL VALID. Two related root causes:

commitizen/tags.py::normalize_tag produces tags that can't be re-parsed by the same tag_format regex when the format mixes literal - with ${prerelease} and semver2 prerelease syntax.
The first bump's tag rendering is itself malformed (0.0-2rc.0 looks like the substitution interpreted ${patch} as ${minor}-${patch} boundaries unexpectedly).

Likely closely related to #1615 (devrelease substitution issue).

test(tags): add devrelease round-trip regression for commitizen-tools…

fix(tags): widen prerelease and devrelease tag regexes for SemVer2 (#…

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Direct bump with changelog creation not possible using semver2, custom tag_format and prerelease option #1614

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Direct bump with changelog creation not possible using semver2, custom tag_format and prerelease option #1614

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bearomorphism commented on May 9, 2026

bearomorphism commented on May 9, 2026

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