Renovate

Have you ever wondered how to keep up with the latest releases of all the dependencies you use? Do you hate it when you forget and then have to fix a lot of code because there have been multiple releases in the meantime?

Well, I do. And that’s where Renovate can help.

All you need to do is install Renovate, configure a bot user for your Git server, pass the credentials to the Renovate configuration, and set up a cron job for it. If you use Kubernetes, you can simply use the helm-chart provided by Renovate.

I only needed to make a few small tweaks to get started:

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{
    "printConfig": true,

    "kubernetes": {
        "fileMatch": ["^k8s_.*\\.yaml$"]
    },
    "droneci": {
        "fileMatch": [".woodpecker.yml"]
    }
}

Every day, I simply check if any pull requests were created by Renovate, with a note on whether it’s a minor or major update. The release notes are attached to the description, which is helpful (although it doesn’t always work perfectly), but it’s a good starting point to know if there’s a lot to update in the code.