Feedback wanted: complexity in Renovate

[jamietanna]

We (the Renovate maintainers) are seeking community feedback on complexity you may feel when working with Renovate.

We're aware that there are areas that both new and experienced folks can find difficult with Renovate, and are trying to understand what these are, from your point of view.

This prompt is being intentionally vague to not "lead the witness", as we want to hear what you have to say.

This could be for Manager-specific behaviour in Renovate, running Renovate as a self-hosted application, or configuring Renovate to match your team's workflow.

Feel free to share high-level feedback, or share specific areas of complexity you've hit before.

Examples are appreciated, too!

Template:

I am a (select multiple if appropriate):

- [ ] user
- [ ] person in a security-focussed role
- [ ] person in a legal-focussed role
- [ ] self-hosted administrator

Feedback:

<!-- any feedback you have -->

[Sironheart]

I am a (select multiple if appropriate):

• user
• person in a security-focussed role
• person in a legal-focussed role
• self-hosted administrator

Feedback:

There is always some confusion regarding the merging of several config levels. For example, when are extends applied to the configuration? Are they applied before/after merging the repository config? When will keywords in the repository override the ones in the global context?
I believe a flow diagram of when which configuration gets resolved/merged would be beneficial to have as a lookup.

Generally a (basic) flow diagram of how the configurations get resolved, from starting the renovate CLI, in what order are keywords applied/checked, up to creating MRs in the repository.

[jamietanna]

Documentation indicating this sounds very reasonable! (Especially if we had a way to keep it up-to-date)

#39314 may help with this too, where it'll be possible to see what the "final" config is

[marians]

I am a:

• user

I find it difficult to get customManagers (regex based managers) working. In some cases I gave up, as after several slow round-trips of config changes and waiting for renovate to succeed, then reading logs, I didn't find it important enough to justify the effort. In this case I would wish for a local method that would make it easy for me to test my config. (It may be that all this exists. Take it as a sign of complexity that I failed to figure it out.)

[gaeljw]

+1 on this, I've now got a few examples that I reuse to build new custom managers but getting the first one to work and how to test it easily was definitely not easy.

[jamietanna]

#41753 might help in the meantime