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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Frequently Asked Questions for Renovate Configuration

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

What is the default behavior?

Renovate will:

  • Look for configuration options in a configuration file (e.g. renovate.json) and in each package.json file
  • Find and process all package files (e.g. package.json, composer.json, Dockerfile, etc) in each repository
  • Use separate branches/PR for each dependency
  • Use separate branches for each major version of each dependency
  • Pin devDependencies to a single version, rather than use ranges
  • Pin dependencies to a single version if it appears not to be a library
  • Update yarn.lock and/or package-lock.json files if found
  • Create Pull Requests immediately after branch creation

What if I need to .. ?

Use an alternative branch as my Pull Request target

Say your repository's default branch is master but you want Renovate to use the next branch as its PR target. You can configure the PR target branch via the baseBranches option.

Add this line to the renovate.json file that's in the default branch (master in this example).

{
  "baseBranches": ["next"]
}

You can set more than one PR target branch in the baseBranches array.

Support private npm modules

See the dedicated Private npm module support page.

Control Renovate's schedule

Renovate itself will run as often as its administrator has configured it (e.g. hourly, daily, etc). You may want to update certain repositories less often. Or you may even want to use different schedules for specific packages.

To control the days of the week or times of day that Renovate updates packages, use the timezone and schedule configuration options. By default, Renovate schedules use the UTC timezone, but you can override this in the global config.

You can set a specific time zone in your local config file as well:

{
  "timezone": "America/Los_Angeles"
}

The timezone must be a valid IANA time zone.

With the timezone set, you can define days of week or hours of the day in which Renovate will make changes. Renovate uses the later library to parse the text. The later library also handles the concepts of "days", time_before", and "time_after".

Examples of the kind of schedules you can create:

every weekend
before 5:00am
[after 10pm, before 5:00am]
[after 10pm every weekday, before 5am every weekday]
on friday and saturday

The scheduling feature can be very useful for "noisy" packages that are updated frequently, such as aws-sdk.

To restrict aws-sdk to weekly updates, you could add this package rule:

  "packageRules": [
    {
      "matchPackageNames": ["aws-sdk"],
      "schedule": ["after 9pm on sunday"]
    }
  ]

The "schedule" propery must always be defined in an array, even if you only set a single schedule. Multiple entries in the array means "or".

Disable Renovate for certain dependency types

Define a packageRules entry which has the dependency type(s) in matchDepTypes and "enabled": false.

Use a single branch/PR for all dependency upgrades

Add a configuration for configuration option groupName set to value "all", at the top level of your renovate.json or package.json.

Use separate branches per dependency, but not one per major release

Set configuration option separateMajorMinor to false.

Keep using SemVer ranges, instead of pinning dependencies

Set configuration option rangeStrategy to "replace".

Keep lock files (including sub-dependencies) up-to-date, even when package.json hasn't changed

By default, if you enable lock-file maintenance, Renovate will update the lockfile ["before 5am on monday"]. If you want to update the lock file more often, update the schedule field inside the lockFileMaintenance object.

Wait until tests have passed before creating the PR

Set the configuration option prCreation to "status-success". Branches with failing tests will remain in Git and continue to get updated if necessary, but no PR will be created until their tests pass.

Wait until tests have passed before creating a PR, but create the PR even if they fail

Set the configuration option prCreation to "not-pending".

Assign PRs to specific user(s)

Set the configuration option assignees to an array of usernames.

Add labels to PRs

Set the configuration option labels to an array of labels to use.

Apply a rule, but only to package abc?

  1. Add a packageRules array to your configuration
  2. Create one object inside this array
  3. Set field matchPackageNames to value ["abc"]
  4. Add the configuration option to the same object

e.g.

"packageRules": [
  {
    "matchPackageNames": ["abc"],
    "assignees": ["importantreviewer"]
  }
]

Apply a rule, but only for packages starting with abc

Do the same as above, but instead of using matchPackageNames, use matchPackagePatterns and a regex:

"packageRules": [
  {
    "matchPackagePatterns": "^abc",
    "assignees": ["importantreviewer"]
  }
]

Group all packages starting with abc together in one PR

As above, but apply a groupName:

"packageRules": [
  {
    "matchPackagePatterns": "^abc",
    "groupName": ["abc packages"]
  }
]

Change the default branch name, commit message, PR title or PR description

You can use the branchName, commitMessage, prTitle or prBody configuration options to change the defaults for those settings.

Automatically merge passing Pull Requests

Set the configuration option autoMerge to true. Nest it inside config objects patch or minor if you want it to apply to certain types only.

Separate patch releases from minor releases

Renovate's default behavior for major/minor releases

Renovate's default behavior is to separate major and minor releases, patch releases are also considered "minor". Let's explain the default behavior with an example:

Say you are using a package snorgleborf, it's the 0.8.0 version. The snorgleborf maintainers then release the following versions:

  • 0.8.1 (patch)
  • 0.9.0 (minor)
  • 1.0.0 (major)

Renovate would then open the following PRs:

  • Update dependency snorgleborf to 0.9.0 (minor)
  • Update dependency snorgleborf to 1.0.0 (major)

Note how Renovate groups the patch and minor versions together into one PR. This means you only get a PR for the minor version, 0.9.0.

You can override the default behavior. To learn more read the section below.

Overriding the default behavior for major/minor releases

You can see in the example above that Renovate won't normally open a PR for the snorgleborf patch release.

You can tell Renovate to open a separate PR for the patch release by setting separateMinorPatch to true.

In both cases, Renovate will open 3 PRs:

  • Update dependency snorgleborf to 0.8.1 (patch)
  • Update dependency snorgleborf to 0.9.0 (minor)
  • Update dependency snorgleborf to 1.0.0 (major)

Most people don't want more PRs though. But it can still be handy to get PRs for patches when using automerge:

  • Get daily patch updates which are automerged once tests pass
  • Get weekly updates for minor and major updates

The end result would be that you barely notice Renovate during the week, while you still get the benefits of patch level updates.