Autodiscover filter to include whole group, except for selected projects

[szpak]

How are you running Renovate?

Self-hosted

If you're self-hosting Renovate, tell us what version of Renovate you run.

34.129.0

If you're self-hosting Renovate, select which platform you are using.

GitLab self-hosted

If you're self-hosting Renovate, tell us what version of the platform you run.

No response

Was this something which used to work for you, and then stopped?

I never saw this working

Wanted end result.

I'm introducing Renovate in my organization (using self-hosted GitLab) . I started by adding some pilot project one by one and it worked fine. As the second step, I would like to be able to add the whole GitLab groups, one by one (to have a look at the performance metrics). It can be easily achieved with the autodiscovery and adding a Renovate user to the whole group. However, in those groups there are also some technical/deprecated projects and I would prefer to have them ignored by Renovate (to not generate fuzz and to do not unnecessary spend time on them).

What you tried so far.

I wanted to use the autodiscovery filer (in the global configuration) as follows, but it didn't work:

  autodiscover: true,
  autodiscoverFilter: [
    "whole-group1/*",
    "!/whole-group1/legacy-project-to-skip/",
    ...

It might be causes by the fact that OR is used on the filters.

Is it possible to add the whole group, but exclude some of its projects? I don't want to add all the project in a group by hand to automatically detect new projects.

Relevant debug logs

Logs

INFO: Autodiscovered repositories
       "length": 10,
       "repositories": [
         "whole-group1/wanted-project",
         "whole-group1/legacy-project-to-skip",
...

[rarkins]

I confirmed in the docs, it says "If you set multiple filters, then the matches of each filter are added to the overall result."

i.e. it's OR functionality, not AND.

@secustor wrote this and may have ideas

[secustor]

No, there is currently no way to this in the discovery phase.

What you can do is

1. Archive the project, because Renovate will ignore archived projects during discovery
   

   renovate/lib/modules/platform/gitlab/index.ts

   Line 146 in 1fede64

   const url = `projects?membership=true&per_page=100&with_merge_requests_enabled=true&min_access_level=30&archived=false`;

2. Add such a renovate.json to your project.

{
  "enabled": false
}

[rarkins]

3. Create a feature request issue for "autodiscoverExclusions", which will be patterns to exclude, and they will be ANDed together. So we would OR together autodiscoverFilter and then AND together all in autodiscoverExclusions

[szpak]

Thanks for the confirmation it is currently problematic to achieve.

I use onboarding, so closing the initial onboarding MR in those project should tell Renovate to ignore them, so it is also some approach (similar to enabled: false).

Nevertheless, it could be more clear to have a way to exclude to projects/subgroups in the global configuration, so I created a future request: #21347