Renovate Runner

We use Renovate to automatically open merge requests on our GitLab-based repositories when a dependency is out of date. Due to limitations within GitLab's security model, we have to create our own copy of the upstream renovate-runner repository. This copy runs once per day and scans our GitLab repositories for any which have a renovate.json file, and creates relevant merge requests against them.

Our copy of the runner is set up to run once daily and will create up to two pull requests against an onboarded repository each day (unless manually triggered for additional runs). Note that our copy is only available to OpenCraft team members, and is NOT a fork of the runner repository, but an independently cloned and pushed version. This is by recommendation of the renovate-runner bot developers.

Enabling Renovate Updates for Your Repository

To enable Renovate for one of our GitLab-based repositories, you must:

1. Ensure that the repository is under the OpenCraft namespace on GitLab
2. Add a renovate.json file to the repository.

That's it. The recommended renovate.json file contents are:

{
  "$schema": "https://docs.renovatebot.com/renovate-schema.json",
  "extends": ["config:recommended"]
}

Expect to get several pull requests over the next few days. They will slow down to a dribble once the repository is fully up to date.

Manually Triggering the Renovate Bot

You can also forcibly run the renovate bot to generate new pull requests (and test that your renovate.json file was recognized) by going to the Pipeline Schedules for the runner and triggering a run.