🤖 How to configure Renovate - automated dependencies updates for your project

Renovate - is a tool that does automated dependency updates for your project and the nicest thing is that it's free for public repositories.

It will analyze your project dependencies and will create a new Pull Request (PR) with the individual dependency update. It is completely controllable so you wouldn't update something by accident that you don't want to update.

Step 1. Install Renovate from GitHub Marketplace

Go to https://github.com/apps/renovate and click on Install Now at the bottom of the page, select "Open Source" plan and you're done.

This will add Renovate to the list of installed applications on GitHub:

Step 2. Add Renovate to the specific repository

On the Applications page find Renovate and click on the Configure button at the right. When the new page opens scroll down to the bottom. Here you can see an overview of the permissions and repository access section.

There are two options configure Renovate for All repositories and for Only selected repositories. Select Only selected repositories and find your repository for which you want to configure automated updates from the dropdown. Mine is called alex-blog in this case.

Step 3. Configure Renovate inside your repository

After all the steps above you'll shortly receive a first pull request from Renovate bot which walks you through the configuration process.

That PR will add renovate.json to your repository extending basic configuration for renovate. You can add custom configurations to this file later if you need them.

Step 4. Carefully read and review the first renovate PR

After merging first renovate PR Configure Renovate you will start to receive a lot of automatic dependencies updates via pull requests. That's it, you’re done 🙂 Sit back relax, review and merge. Don't forget to do a functional test for your application with the new updates 😉