npm install -g renovate
Renovate does not embed npm
, pnpm
and yarn
as its own dependencies.
If you want to use these package managers to update your lockfiles, you must ensure that the correct versions are already installed globally.
npm install -g yarn pnpm
The same goes for any other third party binary tool like gradle
or poetry
- you need to make sure they are installed and the appropriate version before running Renovate.
Renovate is available for Docker via an automated build renovate/renovate.
It builds latest
based on the main
branch and all semver tags are published too.
For example, all the following are valid tags:
docker run --rm renovate/renovate
docker run --rm renovate/renovate:25.69.4
docker run --rm renovate/renovate:25.69
docker run --rm renovate/renovate:25
Do not use the example tags listed above, as they will be out-of-date. Go to renovate/renovate tags to grab the latest tagged release from Renovate.
If you want to configure Renovate using a config.js
file then map it to /usr/src/app/config.js
using Docker volumes.
For example:
docker run --rm -v "/path/to/your/config.js:/usr/src/app/config.js" renovate/renovate
Renovate's official Docker image is compatible with Kubernetes. The following is an example manifest of running Renovate against a GitHub Enterprise server. First the Kubernetes manifest:
apiVersion: batch/v1beta1
kind: CronJob
metadata:
name: renovate
spec:
schedule: '@hourly'
concurrencyPolicy: Forbid
jobTemplate:
spec:
template:
spec:
containers:
- name: renovate
# Update this to the latest available and then enable Renovate on
# the manifest
image: renovate/renovate:25.69.4
args:
- user/repo
# Environment Variables
env:
- name: LOG_LEVEL
value: debug
envFrom:
- secretRef:
name: renovate-env
restartPolicy: Never
And also this accompanying secret.yaml
:
apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
name: renovate-env
type: Opaque
stringData:
GITHUB_COM_TOKEN: 'any-personal-user-token-for-github-com-for-fetching-changelogs'
# You can set RENOVATE_AUTODISCOVER to true to run Renovate on all repos you have push access to
RENOVATE_AUTODISCOVER: 'false'
RENOVATE_ENDPOINT: 'https://github.company.com/api/v3'
RENOVATE_GIT_AUTHOR: 'Renovate Bot <bot@renovateapp.com>'
RENOVATE_PLATFORM: 'github'
RENOVATE_TOKEN: 'your-github-enterprise-renovate-user-token'
A config.js
file can be added to the manifest using a ConfigMap
as shown in the following example (using a "dry run" in github.com):
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
name: renovate-config
data:
config.json: |-
{
"repositories": ["orgname/repo","username/repo"],
"dryRun" : "true"
}
---
apiVersion: batch/v1beta1
kind: CronJob
metadata:
name: renovate-bot
spec:
schedule: '@hourly'
concurrencyPolicy: Forbid
jobTemplate:
spec:
template:
spec:
containers:
- image: renovate/renovate:25.69.4
name: renovate-bot
env: # For illustration purposes, please use secrets.
- name: RENOVATE_PLATFORM
value: 'github'
- name: RENOVATE_TOKEN
value: 'some-token'
- name: RENOVATE_AUTODISCOVER
value: 'false'
- name: RENOVATE_BASE_DIR
value: '/tmp/renovate/'
- name: RENOVATE_CONFIG_FILE
value: '/opt/renovate/config.json'
- name: LOG_LEVEL
value: debug
volumeMounts:
- name: config-volume
mountPath: /opt/renovate/
- name: work-volume
mountPath: /tmp/renovate/
restartPolicy: Never
volumes:
- name: config-volume
configMap:
name: renovate-config
- name: work-volume
emptyDir: {}
If you are using CircleCI, you can use the third-party daniel-shuy/renovate orb to run a self-hosted instance of Renovate on CircleCI.
By default, the orb looks for the self-hosted configuration file in the project root, but you can specify another path to the configuration file with the config_file_path
parameter.
Secrets should be configured using environment variables (eg. RENOVATE_TOKEN
, GITHUB_COM_TOKEN
).
Configure environment variables in CircleCI Project Settings. To share environment variables across projects, use CircleCI Contexts.
The following example runs Renovate hourly, and looks for the self-hosted configuration file at renovate-config.js
:
version: '2.1'
orbs:
renovate: daniel-shuy/renovate@2.1.1
workflows:
renovate:
jobs:
- renovate/self-hosted:
config_file_path: renovate-config.js
nightly:
triggers:
- schedule:
cron: 0 * * * *
filters:
branches:
only:
- main
How to validate your config as part of your workflow:
version: '2.1'
orbs:
renovate: daniel-shuy/renovate@2.1
workflows:
lint:
jobs:
- renovate/validate-config
For GitLab pipelines we recommend you use the renovate-runner project on GitLab. We've prepared some pipeline templates to run Renovate on pipeline schedules in an easy way. You can also find the configuration steps there.
For self-hosted GitLab clone/import the renovate-runner project to your instance.
By default, Renovate stores all files in the renovate/
subdirectory of the operating system's temporary directory, e.g. /tmp/renovate/
.
Repository data is copied or cloned into unique subdirectories under repos/
, e.g. /tmp/renovate/repos/github/owner1/repo-a/
.
Renovate's own cache, as well as the caches(s) for npm, Yarn, Composer etc, is stored in /tmp/renovate/cache
.
To use another directory as the base directory, instead of tmp/renovate
:
- Configure a value for
baseDir
inconfig.js
- Use an environment variable
RENOVATE_BASE_DIR
- Use the CLI to pass a base directory:
--base-dir=
If you want to override the cache location then configure a value for cacheDir
instead.
The following example uses the Renovate CLI tool, which can be installed by running npm i -g renovate
.
If running your own Renovate bot then you will need a user account that Renovate will run as.
It's recommended to use a dedicated account for the bot, e.g. name it renovate-bot
if on your own instance.
Create and save a Personal Access Token for this account.
Create a Renovate config file, e.g. here is an example:
module.exports = {
endpoint: 'https://self-hosted.gitlab/api/v4/',
token: '**gitlab_token**',
platform: 'gitlab',
onboardingConfig: {
extends: ['config:base'],
},
repositories: ['username/repo', 'orgname/repo'],
};
Here change the logFile
and repositories
to something appropriate.
Also replace gitlab-token
value with the one created during the previous step.
If running against GitHub Enterprise, change the above gitlab
values to the equivalent GitHub ones.
You can save this file as anything you want and then use RENOVATE_CONFIG_FILE
env variable to tell Renovate where to find it.
Most people will run Renovate via cron, e.g. once per hour.
Here is an example bash script that you can point cron
to:
#!/bin/bash
export PATH="/home/user/.yarn/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:$PATH"
export RENOVATE_CONFIG_FILE="/home/user/renovate-config.js"
export RENOVATE_TOKEN="**some-token**" # GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps
export GITHUB_COM_TOKEN="**github-token**" # Delete this if using github.com
# Renovate
renovate
Note: the GitHub.com token in env is necessary in order to retrieve Release Notes that are usually hosted on github.com. You don't need to add it if you are already running the bot against github.com, but you do need to add it if you're using GitHub Enterprise, GitLab, Azure DevOps, or Bitbucket.
You should save and test out this script manually first, and add it to cron once you've verified it.
This section describes how to use Git binary with SSH for Gitlab, to avoid API shortcomings.
You need to first create a SSH key, then add the public part to Gitlab (see this guide)
Then, you need to create the secret to add the SSH key, and the following config to your container
host gitlab.com
HostName gitlab.com
StrictHostKeyChecking no
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa
User git
To easily create the secret, you can do the following (see docs)
kubectl create secret generic ssh-key-secret --from-file=config=/path/to/config --from-file=id_rsa=/path/to/.ssh/id_rsa --from-file=id_rsa.pub=/path/to/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
It creates something like this
apiVersion: v1
data:
config: aG9zdCBnaXRsYWIuY29tCiAgSG9zdE5hbWUgZ2l0bGFiLmNvbQogIFN0cmljdEhvc3RLZXlDaGVja2luZyBubwogIElkZW50aXR5RmlsZSB+Ly5zc2gvaWRfcnNhCiAgVXNlciBnaXQ=
id_rsa: <base64String>
id_rsa.pub: <base64String>
kind: Secret
metadata:
name: ssh-key-secret
namespace: <namespace>
Then you just need to add Git author, and mount volumes. The final configuration should look something like this:
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Namespace
metadata:
name: <namespace, for example renovate>
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
name: renovate-env
namespace: <namespace>
type: Opaque
stringData:
GITHUB_COM_TOKEN: 'any-personal-user-token-for-github-com-for-fetching-changelogs'
RENOVATE_AUTODISCOVER: 'false'
RENOVATE_ENDPOINT: 'https://github.company.com/api/v3'
RENOVATE_GIT_AUTHOR: 'Renovate Bot <bot@renovateapp.com>'
RENOVATE_PLATFORM: 'github'
RENOVATE_TOKEN: 'your-github-enterprise-renovate-user-token'
---
apiVersion: v1
data:
config: aG9zdCBnaXRsYWIuY29tCiAgSG9zdE5hbWUgZ2l0bGFiLmNvbQogIFN0cmljdEhvc3RLZXlDaGVja2luZyBubwogIElkZW50aXR5RmlsZSB+Ly5zc2gvaWRfcnNhCiAgVXNlciBnaXQ=
id_rsa: <base64String>
id_rsa.pub: <base64String>
kind: Secret
metadata:
name: ssh-key-secret
namespace: <namespace>
---
apiVersion: batch/v1beta1
kind: CronJob
metadata:
name: renovate
namespace: <namespace>
spec:
schedule: '@hourly'
concurrencyPolicy: Forbid
jobTemplate:
spec:
template:
spec:
volumes:
- name: ssh-key-volume
secret:
secretName: ssh-key-secret
containers:
- name: renovate
# Update this to the latest available and then enable Renovate on the manifest
image: renovate/renovate:25.69.4
volumeMounts:
- name: ssh-key-volume
readOnly: true
mountPath: '/home/ubuntu/.ssh'
args:
- <repository>
# Environment Variables
envFrom:
- secretRef:
name: renovate-env
restartPolicy: Never
It's recommended to configure LOG_LEVEL=debug
and LOG_FORMAT=json
in environment if you are ingesting/parsing logs into another system.
Debug logging is usually necessary for any debugging, while JSON format will mean that the output is parseable.
When you use LOG_LEVEL=debug
and LOG_FORMAT=json
, Renovate uses numbers in the level
field.
The logging level output is controlled by the Bunyan logging library.
Level | Meaning |
---|---|
10 | trace |
20 | debug |
30 | info |
40 | warn |
50 | error |
60 | fatal |