Note: When writing this post, I am running on Renovate v39. This may change with later versions, but I expect to push an update if this happens; at least as long as I actively work on this blog.

The problem

I am building my blog with Hugo, and the Deployment happens via a Forgejo action. Until now, I had a script that just downloaded the latest version of Hugo and used that to build the website.

I grew to preferring fixed versions and doing tests before updating. Also, I had setup Renovate lately, so I wanted to get them both together.

Repo Setup

The most important change within the repo is that I now have a new file called hugo-version.txt which contains just two lines:

0.145.0

Note: There is an empty new line after that. This is important, but seemingly it gets discarded by my Code Renderer. I will have to fix that…

I have got a Download script that until now downloaded the latest version of Hugo; now, newly, it instead downloads the here defined version. See the dowloading reference section if you are interested.

Renovate Setup

Now naturally, Renovate will not understand this file out of the box, so we have to fix that. I already have a renovate.json file in my repo, which I am now going to update with the following settings:

"customManagers": [
    {
        "customType": "regex",
        "fileMatch": ["^hugo-version\\.txt$"],
        "matchStrings": ["(?<currentValue>.*)\\n"],
        "depNameTemplate": "gohugoio/hugo",
        "datasourceTemplate": "github-releases"
    }
]

A bit explained what is happening here:

  • Search for the hugo-version.txt file. Note that we define ^ and $ so that the regex exclusively matches this file, and nothing else. Also, we have to escape the ., as this is a special character in regular expressions. Finally we have to escape the backslash as JSON otherwise is confused…
  • The matchStrings part tells what we will find in the repo: The current value and then a newline. As discussed above, I have got the newline in there, so I also have to define it here.
  • depNameTemplate is here quite simple: gohugoio/hugo - the name of the Github Repo where Hugo is hosted and released. We can probably add the Dependency name into the file as well, but this would make the download script more complicated again, so I will leave it as is.
  • Finally, datasourceTemplate is github-releases, since I am looking for a Github Release.

Done!

It took a lot of time to look that up and understand what is happening, but in the end this is actually not too complicated!

Downloading Reference

The old script

Just for reference, in case you are interested, this is my old download script/command that just downloaded the latest version:

curl -s  https://api.github.com/repos/gohugoio/hugo/releases/latest \
    | grep browser_download_url  \
    | cut -d '"' -f 4  \
    | grep 'hugo_extended_' \
    | grep '_linux-amd64.tar.gz' \
    | grep -v 'withdeploy' \
    | wget -i -

Feel free to use that thing if you want to. It should not be too difficult to figure out what is happening here.

The new script

My new script is quite a lot simpler:

VERSION=$(cat hugo-version.txt)
wget https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/releases/download/v${VERSION}/hugo_extended_${VERSION}_linux-amd64.tar.gz

After downloading

No matter which version you use, you will have to unzip the downloaded file and then make the executable executable with chomd +x.