GitHub Action Renovate

GitHub Action to run Renovate self-hosted.

Table of contents

• Badges
• Options
  • configurationFile
  • token
• Example
• Troubleshooting
  • Debug Logging
  • Special token requirements when using the github-actions manager

Badges

Badge	Description	Service
	Code style	Prettier
	Commit style	Conventional Commits
	Dependencies	Renovate
	Build	GitHub Actions
	Example	GitHub Actions

Options

Options can be passed using the inputs of this action or the corresponding environment variables. When both are passed, the input takes precedence over the environment variable. For the available environment variables see the Renovate Self-Hosted Configuration docs.

configurationFile

Configuration file to configure Renovate. The supported configurations files can be one of the configuration files listed in the Renovate Docs for Configuration Options or a JavaScript file that exports a configuration object. For both of these options, an example can be found in the example directory.

The configurations that can be done in this file consists of two parts, as listed below. Refer to the links to the Renovate Docs for all options.

1. Self-Hosted Configuration Options
2. Configuration Options

The branchPrefix option is important to configure and should be configured to a value other than the default to prevent interference with e.g. the Renovate GitHub App.

If you want to use this with just the single configuration file, make sure to include the following two configuration lines. This disables the requirement of a configuration file for the repository and disables onboarding.

  onboarding: false,
  requireConfig: false,

token

Generate a personal access token, with the repo:public_repo scope for only public repositories or the repo scope for public and private repositories, and add it to Secrets (repository settings) as RENOVATE_TOKEN. You can also create a token without a specific scope, which gives read-only access to public repositories, for testing. This token is only used by Renovate, see the token configuration, and gives it access to the repositories. The name of the secret can be anything as long as it matches the argument given to the token option.

Note that the GITHUB_TOKEN secret can't be used for authenticating Renovate because it has too restrictive permissions. In particular, using the GITHUB_TOKEN to create a new Pull Request from more types of Github Workflows results in Pull Requests that do not trigger your Pull Request and Push CI events.

If you want to use the github-actions manager, you must setup a special token with some requirements.

Example

This example uses a personal access token and will run every 15 minutes. The personal access token is configured as a GitHub secret named RENOVATE_TOKEN. This example uses the example/renovate-config.js file as configuration. You can also see a live example of this action in my github-renovate repository, which also includes a more advanced configuration for updating GitHub Action workflows.

Remark Update the action version to the most current, see here for latest release.

name: Renovate
on:
  schedule:
    # The "*" (#42, asterisk) character has special semantics in YAML, so this
    # string has to be quoted.
    - cron: '0/15 * * * *'
jobs:
  renovate:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v2.0.0
      - name: Self-hosted Renovate
        uses: renovatebot/github-action@v32.238.4
        with:
          configurationFile: example/renovate-config.js
          token: ${{ secrets.RENOVATE_TOKEN }}

Example with GitHub App

Instead of using a Personal Access Token (PAT) that is tied to a particular user you can use a GitHub App where permissions can be even better tuned. Create a new app and configure the app permissions and your config.js as described in the Renovate documentation.

Store the app ID as a secret with name APP_ID and generate a new private key for the app and add it as a secret to the repository as APP_PEM in the repository where the action will run from. Note that APP_PEM needs to be base64 encoded. You can encode your private key file like this from the terminal on Linux (omit the -w 0 if you're on a Mac):

cat your_app_key.pem | base64 -w 0

Adjust your Renovate configuration file to specify the username of your bot.

Going forward we will be using the machine-learning-apps/actions-app-token action in order to exchange the GitHub App certificate for an access token that renovate can use.

The final workflow will look like this:

name: Renovate
on:
  schedule:
    # The "*" (#42, asterisk) character has special semantics in YAML, so this
    # string has to be quoted.
    - cron: '0/15 * * * *'
jobs:
  renovate:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Get token
        id: get_token
        uses: machine-learning-apps/actions-app-token@master
        with:
          APP_PEM: ${{ secrets.APP_PEM }}
          APP_ID: ${{ secrets.APP_ID }}

      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v2.0.0

      - name: Self-hosted Renovate
        uses: renovatebot/github-action@v32.238.4
        with:
          configurationFile: example/renovate-config.js
          token: 'x-access-token:${{ steps.get_token.outputs.app_token }}'

Troubleshooting

Debug logging

In case of issues, it's always a good idea to enable debug logging first. To enable debug logging, add the environment variable LOG_LEVEL: 'debug' to the action:

- name: Self-hosted Renovate
  uses: renovatebot/github-action@v32.238.4
  with:
    configurationFile: example/renovate-config.js
    token: ${{ secrets.RENOVATE_TOKEN }}
  env:
    LOG_LEVEL: 'debug'

Special token requirements when using the github-actions manager

If you want to use the github-actions manager in Renovate, ensure that the token you provide contains the workflow scope. Otherwise, GitHub does not allow Renovate to update worklow files and therefore it will be unable to create update PRs for affected packages (like actions/checkout or renovatebot/github-action itself).