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How to enable automerge with renovatebot

This guide shows you how to enable automerge support with renovatebot. When automerge is enabled certain Merge Requests opened by renovatebot will be approved and merged automatically.

Note

Since 10 Aug 2026, automergeModerate is enabled by default.

Choose your level of automerge

We have the following levels of automerge available as custom presets:

  • Gentle: use this level if you have low confidence in your CI/CD setup. Only the most uncontroversial changes such as digest pinning, lock file maintenance and patch-level updates will be automerged.
  • Moderate: use this level if you have moderate confidence in your CI/CD setup. In addition to the updates from the "gentle" level, minor version updates will also be automerged. This is the default level since 10 Aug 2026.
  • Disabled: use this to override the default "moderate" level and disable automerge on a per-repo basis.

Automerge presets may change over time

DO NOT choose your level of automerge based on the exact types of Merge Requests covered by the presets. The exact types of Merge Requests which will be merged may change over time as we refine our automerge strategy. DO choose your level of automerge based on your confidence in your CI/CD setup.

Add the appropriate preset to the renovate configuration

For the "gentle" level, update renovate.json in the following manner:

{
  extends: [
    // ... other presets ...
    "local>uis/devops/renovate-config:automergeGentle"
  ]
}

The "moderate" level is the default since 10 Aug 2026, so no configuration is required. If you prefer to be explicit, update renovate.json in the following manner:

{
  extends: [
    // ... other presets ...
    "local>uis/devops/renovate-config:automergeModerate"
  ]
}

To disable automerge, add the "disabled" preset to renovate.json along with a description explaining why automerge is not suitable for the project. For example:

{
  extends: [
    // ... other presets ...
    "local>uis/devops/renovate-config:automergeDisabled"
  ],
  "description": [
    "Automerge disabled: deployed on-prem by a manual Ansible run, with no staging environment",
    "and minimal test coverage. Revisit once integration tests are in place."
  ]
}

Warning

All custom automerge presets (automergeGentle, automergeModerate, and automergeDisabled) must appear after local>uis/devops/renovate-config in the extends array, otherwise the default "moderate" configuration overrides them. Do not use renovatebot's built-in :automergeDisabled preset: it only sets the top-level automerge option, which the per-update-type settings in our default configuration override.

Tip

You are not limited to our custom presets. You can use one of the built-in renovatebot presets or configure your exact automerge strategy using custom match rules.

Check that the configuration is working

After merging the change to the renovatebot configuration and waiting for renovatebot to open appropriate Merge Requests, you can check if automerge is working by searching for merged Merge Requests which were approved by uis-devops-triagebot.

Note

Triagebot currently will only approve automerge Merge Requests during the working day, Monday to Friday. This is to increase the chance that someone is available to revert the change if needed.

Summary

In this guide you learned how to enable automerge for your project.

Next steps