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Renovate at GitLab: Current Implementation Documentation

Overview

Section titled “Overview”

Renovate is a dependency update tool used at GitLab to automate the process of keeping dependencies up-to-date. This document outlines the current implementation, configurations, and workflows of Renovate within the GitLab infrastructure.

Current Implementation Approach

Section titled “Current Implementation Approach”

GitLab uses common-ci-tasks as the single, standard approach for running Renovate across projects.

Repository: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gl-infra/common-ci-tasks

Key Characteristics:

  • Per-project CI job implementation
  • Requires CI include and renovate.json configuration. This can be generated for you using our common-template-copier template.
  • Uses custom container image with specific tooling installed
  • Onboarding is driven by infra-mgmt, which enables the common_ci_tasks stanza for a project (in combination with the common-template-copier template)

Focus Areas:

  • Security and isolation by running one job per project
  • Custom tooling baked into the image to generate/update templates and non-standard files

Documentation:

Adding dependencies

Section titled “Adding dependencies”

To configure Renovate Bot for a given project, follow the Automated Project Setup documentation in common-ci-tasks.

Section titled “Related Resources”

Best Practices

Section titled “Best Practices”

Renovate best practices are documented in the common-ci-tasks project.

Troubleshooting

Section titled “Troubleshooting”

Dependency not being picked up

Section titled “Dependency not being picked up”

If you configured a dependency and it isn’t getting picked up by Renovate check the output of the latest scheduled pipeline job on the project in question.

If you need further debug data, check the renovate-log.ndjson file on the CI job’s artifacts and grep for the project’s name.

Testing out Renovate changes

Section titled “Testing out Renovate changes”

If you suspect your renovate.json may need adjustments, you can try them out before merging them the following way:

  • npm install -g renovate
  • From a local copy of the project you’re testing against, do one of the following:

For a quick test of dependency logic, use:

LOG_LEVEL=DEBUG RENOVATE_PLATFORM=gitlab RENOVATE_TOKEN="${GITLAB_TOKEN}" renovate --platform=local --include-paths "some/path/to/test/**"

If you need to check the logic behind branch creation and opening MRs, use:

RENOVATE_REPOSITORIES=some/repo/to/test RENOVATE_BASE_BRANCH_PATTERNS=some-branch-to-test \
LOG_LEVEL=DEBUG RENOVATE_PLATFORM=gitlab RENOVATE_TOKEN="${GITLAB_TOKEN}" renovate --dry-run=full --include-paths "some/path/to/test/**" \
--branch-prefix-old "test/" --branch-prefix="test/" --use-base-branch-config=merge --autodiscover=false