How to trigger renovatebot runs using the GitLab UI¶
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.