Separate configuration for hosted Renovate vs. Renovate CLI?

[janpio]

We are thinking about possibly using the Renovate CLI for some of our dependencies where we have special requirements that the hosted renovate GitHub app can not give us (running more often, less cache time for Npm, triggering via Slack etc).

Is there a way to have the Renovate CLI use a different configuration than in the renovate.json that is in the default branch of the repo?

[rarkins]

Unfortunately I can't think of any way to achieve this

[viceice]

The only thing which will maybe work is to use the force block in the self-hosted bot config.js to override all relevant settings

[divyenduz]

Thanks, that is helpful, how do I supply baseBranches and pacakgeRules in config.js though? I was trying to find that in the docs here https://docs.renovatebot.com/self-hosted-configuration/

[rarkins]

All user config is valid in self hosted config, although you should normally try to avoid it because it's like a black box to anyone trying to configure renovate.json

[divyenduz]

This doesn't seem to be working for me, here is an output where I try to override baseBranches, the configuration is read but is not respected. It still used the renovate.json file from the repository. 

$ renovate --automerge true --automerge-type pr --dependency-dashboard
 WARN: Config needs migrating
       "originalConfig": {
         "onboarding": true,
         "cacheDir": "/private/var/folders/l5/8t163c4j3j746d9svk672stw0000gn/T",
         "token": "***********",
         "repositories": ["prisma/renovate-test"],
         "requireConfig": true,
         "forceCli": true,
         "force": true,
         "baseBranches": ["test"]
       },
       "migratedConfig": {
         "onboarding": true,
         "cacheDir": "/private/var/folders/l5/8t163c4j3j746d9svk672stw0000gn/T",
         "token": "***********",
         "repositories": ["prisma/renovate-test"],
         "requireConfig": true,
         "forceCli": true,
         "force": {"enabled": true},
         "baseBranches": ["test"]
       }
 INFO: Repository started (repository=prisma/renovate-test)
       "renovateVersion": "24.44.0"
 INFO: Dependency extraction complete (repository=prisma/renovate-test)
       "baseBranch": "master",
       "stats": {
         "managers": {
           "github-actions": {"fileCount": 2, "depCount": 2},
           "npm": {"fileCount": 1, "depCount": 6}
         },
         "total": {"fileCount": 3, "depCount": 8}
       }
 INFO: Dependency extraction complete (repository=prisma/renovate-test)
       "baseBranch": "automated/dev",
       "stats": {
         "managers": {
           "github-actions": {"fileCount": 2, "depCount": 2},
           "npm": {"fileCount": 1, "depCount": 5}
         },
         "total": {"fileCount": 3, "depCount": 7}
       }
 INFO: Dependency extraction complete (repository=prisma/renovate-test)
       "baseBranch": "automated/latest",
       "stats": {
         "managers": {
           "github-actions": {"fileCount": 2, "depCount": 2},
           "npm": {"fileCount": 1, "depCount": 5}
         },
         "total": {"fileCount": 3, "depCount": 7}
       }
 WARN: Base branch does not exist - skipping (repository=prisma/renovate-test)
       "baseBranch": "automated/patch-dev"
 INFO: Repository finished (repository=prisma/renovate-test)
       "durationMs": 19756

[rarkins]

You need whatever you're forcing inside the force: {} object

[viceice]

try to use a config.js with

module.exports = {
  force: {
    baseBranches: ["test"],
    // more forced config options ...
  }
};