I am hosting quite a lot of internal Git Repositories on my own Forgejo Instance. For dependency management, it was time to install Renovate. Since their docs are a bit confusing for me, I would like to write down how I did this installation - maybe it will help somebody.

Expectations

I wanted the following:

  • Have Renovate run in Docker in my local network
  • Connect Renovate to a chosen set of repositories on my local Forgejo instance, but not all of them!
  • Keep the configuration as simple as possible

Forgejo Preparation

Following their best practices, I setup a new user in my Forgejo instance called renovate-bot. I then logged in as this user and navigated to Settings/Applications. There, I generated a new token which I called Renovate Bot. The permissions are as follows:

  • read:misc
  • read:organization
  • write:issue
  • write:repository
  • read:user

After generation of the token, it is shown only once. Remember this one!

Docker Preparation

I already have a Docker host running which should host Renovate. So no problem here.

My Docker Compose File is quite simple:

services:
  renovate:
    container_name: renovate
    # Note: Please use the latest updated tag here!
    image: ghcr.io/renovatebot/renovate:39.167.1
    environment:
      RENOVATE_CONFIG_FILE: /config.yaml
    volumes:
      - ./config.yaml:/config.yaml:ro
      - ./data:/data

The following points might need a bit of discussion:

  • RENOVATE_CONFIG_FILE: For using an own config file that is not a .js file, I have to define it explicitly, as I did here.
  • config.yaml is the top level config file which I have in the same directory as the Docker Compose file.
  • data is a directory that Renovate uses to cache stuff. I had to adjust permissions here: Renovate seems to run as user 12021. I am not sure how static this user is for me, but it works for me.

Configuration

gitAuthor: Renovate Bot <renovate@tech-tales.blog>
baseDir: /data
autodiscover: true

endpoint: https://forgejo.tech-tales.blog
platform: gitea
token: redacted

Note that the platform has to be gitea instead of forgejo. Currently, this still works out.

Forgejo Database Setup

The database to my Forgejo Instance is running on MariaDB, and until now I had the collation utf8mb3_general_ci for that. Please do not ask me why; I already did quite a lot of migrations to different kinds of platforms and databases, and this was the latest state.

Renovate is using Emojis in their pull requests, and it seems that this collation cannot work with emojis. Maybe also something else failed; as a fact, I did not receive any pull requests from Renovate.

My troubleshooting brought me to the log file of Forgejo which can be found in /var/lib/forgejo/logs/. Funnily enough, the logfile is (still?) called gitea.log, altough there is no reference to gitea in my configuration any more…
Turns out, inserting the pull request into the database failed. After a bit of googling, I decided to update the database collation with the following steps:

  • I have Adminer running to access my database, so I opened the database there.
  • I hit on Export within Adminer, with save and sql as the output and format options. I kept the rest as it was; particularly important: No database, check Routines and Events and keep the DROP+CREATE for tables. Also, I checked Triggers but not Auto Increment.
  • I downloaded the file and created a backup of it. Then (and only after the backup!), I opened the file.
  • Here comes the magic: Open the file, and find the first occurrence of COLLATE. This in my case stated utf8mb3_general_ci. Select utf8mb3_general_ci, do a “Change all occurrences”, and update it to utf8mb4_bin.
    Note that this collation is recommended by Forgejo Docs here.
  • Finally, import this adapted file to the database again.

Success! All tables were adapted. I started Forgejo again, and everything worked out!

Crontab

As a final challenge, I was not sure how to run Renovate once an hour automatically. As far as I know, Docker does not provide this out of the box.

My current alternative is to just have a cronjob on the server that runs docker start renovate every hour. This is not the best way, but the best I could find. I plan on improving that in the future, as I already have a similar setup with running the cronjobs inside a Docker Container, effectively making the concept very much independent of the host. This setup will follow in a later blog post.