This document gives tips and tricks on how to run Renovate locally to add features or fix bugs. You can improve this documentation by opening a pull request. For example, if you think anything is unclear, or you think something needs to be added, open a pull request!
You need the following dependencies for local development:
- Git
>=2.45.1
- Node.js
^20.15.1
- pnpm
^9.0.0
(use corepack) - C++ compiler
We recommend you use the version of Node.js defined in the repository's .nvmrc
.
You can use the following commands on Ubuntu.
curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_20.x | sudo -E bash -
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y git build-essential nodejs
corepack enable
To enter a development shell with the necessary packages, run nix-shell --packages gcc gitFull nodejs
and then corepack enable
.
Follow these steps to set up your development environment on Windows 10. If you already installed a part, skip the corresponding step.
-
Install Git. Make sure you've configured your username and email
-
Install Node.js LTS
-
In an Administrator PowerShell prompt, run
npm install -global npm
and thennpm --debug install --global windows-build-tools
-
Enable corepack with:
corepack enable
You can see what versions you're using like this:
PS C:\Windows\system32> git --version PS C:\Windows\system32> node --version PS C:\Windows\system32> pnpm --version
If you are using VS Code you can skip installing the prerequisites and work in a development container instead.
- Install the Dev Containers extension and check its system requirements
- Open the repository folder in VS Code
- Choose "Reopen in Container" via the command palette or the small button in the lower left corner
The VS Code integrated terminal is now running in the container and can be used to run more commands.
To build inside the container:
pnpm build
If, for some reason, you can't run the relevant versions on your local machine, you can run everything from a Docker image. To build the correct Docker image:
docker build -f .devcontainer/Dockerfile -t renovatebot_local .
Starting from Docker Engine 23.0
and Docker Desktop 4.19
, Docker uses Buildx by default.
So you must run the following command to get the image loaded to the Docker image store:
docker build -f .devcontainer/Dockerfile -t renovatebot_local --load .
Then you can run pnpm
directly from Docker, for instance:
docker run -it --rm -v "${PWD}:/usr/src/app" -w /usr/src/app renovatebot_local pnpm install
If you want to contribute to the project, you should first "fork" the main project using the GitHub website and then clone your fork locally. The Renovate project uses the pnpm package management system instead of npm.
To ensure everything is working properly on your end, you must:
- Install all dependencies with
pnpm install
- Make a build with
pnpm build
, which should pass with no errors - Verify all tests pass and have 100% test coverage, by running
pnpm test
- Verify the installation by running
pnpm start
. You must see this error:You must configure a GitHub personal access token
Do not worry about the token error for now, as you will be given instructions on how to configure the token a little later down in this document.
You only need to do these steps once.
Before you submit a pull request you should:
- Install newer dependencies with
pnpm install
- Run the tests with
pnpm test
Although it's possible to make small source code improvements without testing against a real repository, in most cases you should run a "real" test on a repository before you submit a feature or fix. It's possible to do this against GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket public servers.
If you're going to be doing a lot of Renovate development then we recommend that you set up a dedicated test account on GitHub or GitLab, so that you reduce the risk that you accidentally cause problems when testing out Renovate.
e.g. if your GitHub username is "alex88" then maybe you register "alex88-testing" for use with Renovate.
Once you have decided on your platform and account, log in and generate a "Personal Access Token" that can be used to authenticate Renovate. Select the repo scope when generating the token.
Although you can specify a token to Renovate using --token=
, it can be inconvenient if you need to include this every time.
You are better off to instead export the Environment Variable RENOVATE_TOKEN
for this.
To make sure everything is working, create a test repository in your account, e.g. like https://github.com/r4harry/testrepo1
.
Now, add a file called .nvmrc
with the content 20.0.0
.
Now run against the test repo you created, e.g. pnpm start r4harry/testrepo1
.
If your token is set up correctly, you should find that Renovate created a "Configure Renovate" PR in the testrepo1
.
If this is working then in future you can create other test repos to verify your code changes against.
You can run pnpm test
locally to test your code.
We test all PRs using the same tests, run on GitHub Actions.
pnpm test
runs an eslint
check, a prettier
check, a type
check and then all the unit tests using jest
.
Refactor PRs should ideally not change or remove tests (adding tests is OK).
Run the Jest unit tests with the pnpm jest
command.
You can also run a subset of the Jest tests using file matching, e.g. pnpm jest composer
or pnpm jest workers/repository/update/branch
.
If you get a test failure due to a "snapshot" mismatch, and you are sure that you need to update the snapshot, then you can append -u
to the end.
e.g. pnpm jest composer -u
would update the saved snapshots for all tests in **/composer/**
.
The Renovate project maintains 100% test coverage, so any Pull Request will fail if it does not have full coverage for code.
Using // istanbul ignore
is not ideal, but can be a pragmatic solution if adding more tests wouldn't really prove anything.
To view the current test coverage locally, open up coverage/index.html
in your browser.
Do not let coverage put you off submitting a PR! Maybe we can help, or at least guide. Also, it can be good to submit your PR as a work in progress (WIP) without tests first so that you can get a thumbs up from others about the changes, and write tests after.
We use Prettier to format our code.
If your code fails pnpm test
due to a prettier
rule then run pnpm lint-fix
to fix it or most eslint
errors automatically before running pnpm test
again.
You usually don't need to fix any Prettier errors by hand.
If you're only working on the documentation files, you can use the pnpm doc-fix
command to format your work.
We use MkDocs to generate the documentation.
You can run pnpm build:docs
to generate the docs.
Then use pnpm mkdocs serve
to preview the documentation locally.
The docs will update automatically when you run pnpm build:docs
again, no need to stop the pnpm mkdocs serve
command.
First of all, never commit to the main
branch of your fork - always use a "feature" branch like feat/1234-add-yarn-parsing
.
Make sure your fork is up-to-date with the Renovate main
branch, check this each time before you create a new branch.
To do this, see these GitHub guides:
Usually the debug
log level is good enough to troubleshoot most problems or verify functionality.
It's usually easier to have the logs in a file that you can open with a text editor. You can use a command like this to put the log messages in a file:
LOG_LEVEL=debug pnpm start myaccount/therepo > debug.log
The example command will redirect and save Renovate's output to the debug.log
file.
Warning: the command will overwrite a existing debug.log
!
We want stay backwards-compatible as much as possible, as well as make the code configurable. So most new functionality should be controllable via configuration options.
Create your new configuration option in the lib/config/options/index.ts
file.
Also create documentation for the option in the docs/usage/configuration-options.md
file.
You can debug Renovate with Chrome's inspect tool. Here's an example:
- Open
chrome://inspect
in Chrome, then select "Open dedicated DevTools for Node" - Add a
debugger;
statement somewhere in the source code where you want to start debugging - Run Renovate using
pnpm debug ...
instead ofpnpm start ...
- Select "Resume script execution" in Chrome DevTools and wait for your break point to be triggered
You can also debug Renovate with VS Code. Here's an example:
- In the configuration file, e.g.
config.js
in the root directory of the project, addtoken
with your Personal Access Token - In the same configuration file, add
repositories
with the repository you want to test against. The fileconfig.js
would look something like this:
module.exports = {
token: 'xxxxxxxx',
repositories: ['r4harry/testrepo1'],
};
- Set a breakpoint somewhere in the source code and launch the application in debug mode with selected configuration as
debug
- Wait for your breakpoint to be triggered