configuration-options.md

title: Configuration Options
description: Configuration Options usable in renovate.json or package.json

Configuration Options

This document describes all the configuration options you may configure in a renovate.json file or within a "renovate" section of your package.json. Any config you define applies to the whole repository (e.g. if you have a monorepo).

Also, be sure to check out Renovate's shareable config presets to save yourself from reinventing any wheels.

If you have any questions about the below config options, or would like to get help/feedback about a config, please post it as an issue in renovatebot/config-help where it will be promptly answered.

assignees

Must be valid usernames.

automerge

By default, Renovate raises PRs but leaves them to someone/something else to merge them. By configuring this setting, you can enable Renovate to automerge branches or PRs itself, therefore reducing the amount of human intervention required.

Usually you won't want to automerge all PRs, for example most people would want to leave major dependency updates to a human to review first. In that case you will want to embed this setting inside major, minor, or patch configuration options. For example, you could add this to your renovate.json to automerge only non-major updates:

  "automerge": true,
  "major": {
    "automerge": false
  }

Also note that this option can be combined with other nested settings, such as dependency type. So for example you could elect to automerge all devDependencies only this way:

  "devDependencies": {
    "automerge": true
  }

Warning: GitHub currently has a bug where automerge won't work if a GitHub Organization has protected their master branch, and there is no way to configure around this. Hence, automerging will try and fail in such situations. This doc will be updated once that bug/limitation is fixed by GitHub.

automergeComment

Example use:

{
  "automerge": enabled,
  "automergeType": "pr-comment",
  "automergeComment": "@bors: r+"
}

automergeType

Renovate will default to automerging after creating PRs, but you can override that to automerge without PRs. There are two ways to merge branch upgrades: merge commits, and branch push.

Merge commits will employ the standard GitHub "merge commit" API, just like when you merge a PR with merge commit setting. The downside of this approach is that you will end up with merge commits and not a nice clean default branch!

Branch push employs GitHub's low-level git API to push the Renovate upgrade directly to the head of the base branch (e.g. master) to maintain a "clean" history. The downside of this approach is that it implicitly enables the rebaseStalePrs setting because otherwise we would risk pushing a bad commit to master. i.e. Renovate won't push the commit to base branch unless the branch is completely up-to-date with master and has passed tests, which means that if the default branch is getting updated regularly then it might take several rebases from Renovate until it has a branch commit that is safe to push to master.

baseBranches

If left default (empty) then the default branch of the repository is used.

For most projects, this should be left as default. An example use case for using this setting is a project who uses the default master branch for releases and a separate branch next for preparing for the next release. In that case, the project may prefer for Pull Requests from Renovate to be opened against the next branch instead of master.

If instead the project needs both master and next to be renovated, then both should be put into the baseBranches array.

It's possible to add this setting into the renovate.json file as part of the "Configure Renovate" onboarding PR. If so then Renovate will reflect this setting in its description and use package file contents from the custom base branch instead of default.

bazel

branchName

It's recommended to use our default templates, but you may override branch name if you really wish. It's recommended to still keep depName and newMajor in the branch name to make sure all other Renovate features can still work.

Example branch name: renovate/eslint-4.x.

branchPrefix

You can modify this field if you want to change the prefix used. For example if you want branches to be like deps/eslint-4.x instead of renovate/eslint-4.x then you set branchPrefix = deps/. Or if you wish to avoid forward slashes in branch names then you could use renovate_ instead, for example.

branchTopic

This field is combined with branchPrefix and managerBranchPrefix to form the full branchName. branchName uniqueness is important for dependency update grouping or non-grouping so be cautious about ever editing this field manually.

buildkite

bumpVersion

Set this value to 'patch', 'minor' or 'major' to have Renovate update the version in your edited package.json. e.g. if you wish Renovate to always increase the target package.json version with a patch update, set this to patch.

circleci

commitBody

This is used whenever a commit "body" is needed, e.g. for adding [skip ci] or DCO signoff.

For example, To add [skip ci] to every commit you could configure:

  "commitBody": "[skip ci]"

commitMessage

The commit message is less important than branchName so you may override it if you wish.

Example commit message: "chore(deps): Update dependency eslint to version 4.0.1"

commitMessageAction

This is used to alter commitMessage and prTitle without needing to copy/paste the whole string. Actions may be like 'Update', 'Pin', 'Roll back', 'Refresh', etc.

commitMessageExtra

This is used to alter commitMessage and prTitle without needing to copy/paste the whole string. The "extra" is usually an identifier of the new version, e.g. "to v1.3.2" or "to tag 9.2".

commitMessagePrefix