How to trigger renovatebot runs using the GitLab UI¶
Warning
On-demand triggering of renovatebot is currently experimental and may change over time as we learn more about how people use this feature. If you have any feedback, please open an issue in the appropriate GitLab project.
Ordinarily there are many hours between runs of renovatebot on a project. This is frustrating if, for example, you need renovatebot to rebase or retry a Merge Request or if you can see MRs pending in the Dependency Dashboard and want them opened.
This guide covers how you can trigger a renovatebot run yourself from the Dependency Dashboard issue.
The dependency dashboard¶
Each project using renovatebot has a "Dependency Dashboard" issue. At the bottom of the issue is a checkbox which can be used to trigger a run of renovatebot:
Dependency dashboard showing the manual trigger checkbox.
Ticking the box will result in the checkbox being replaced with a message indicating that a run has been scheduled.
Dependency dashboard showing a manually triggered run.
The checkbox will be restored when renovatebot has completed its run.
Important
A manually triggered run of renovatebot involves the creation and provisioning of a one-off VM for the run and so it can take up to 10 minutes for a run to complete.
The job id can be reported to Developer Experience if a run of renovatebot doesn't seem to have happened within a reasonable amount of time.
Summary¶
In this guide you learned how to trigger a run of renovatebot for a GitLab project using UI exposed in the Dependency Dashboard issue for the project.