Bitbucket Dependency Bot Using Renovate 🤖

What is Renovate?

It is a tool that helps developers keep their software projects up to date. It automatically updates dependencies, such as libraries and packages, for security vulnerabilities and outdated versions.

How do I set up Renovate on Bitbucket Cloud?

Step 1 - Create an access token on your Bitbucket repo.

This will ensure Renovate has permission to create PRs on your behalf.

Step 2 - Create a pipeline variable using the Access Token as your value.

Creating a pipeline variable will make sure the pipeline that we will create to run Renovate will have access to the Access Token we created.

Step 3 - Create a JS file named renovate.js with the following code:

./renovate.js

module.exports = {
  /**
   * Tells which platform Renovate is on.
   * See full platform support here
   * https://docs.renovatebot.com/modules/platform/
   */ 
  platform: 'bitbucket',
  /**
   * This is the Bitbucket variable we create on Step 2
   */
  token: process.env.RENOVATE_TOKEN,
  /**
   * https://docs.renovatebot.com/self-hosted-configuration/#basedir
   */
  baseDir: `${process.env.BITBUCKET_CLONE_DIR}/renovate`,
  /**
   * https://docs.renovatebot.com/self-hosted-configuration/#autodiscover
   */
  autodiscover: true,
};

Step 4 - Create a JS file named renovate.json with the following code:

./renovate.json

{
  "$schema": "https://docs.renovatebot.com/renovate-schema.json",
  "enabledManagers": ["npm"],
  "prHourlyLimit": 4,
  "patch": { "enabled": true },
  "minor": { "enabled": true },
  "major": { "enabled": true },
  "npmrc": "save-exact=true",
  "labels": ["dependencies"]
}

This is a basic example of a configuration file that tells Renovate your preferences.
You can see the full list of configurations here:

https://docs.renovatebot.com/self-hosted-configuration

Step 5 - Create a custom bitbucket-pipelines.yml step that will run Renovate on a schedule.

./bitbucket-pipelines.yml

image: node:18.15-slim

pipelines:
  custom:
    'renovate':
      - step:
          name: Check for package updates
          image: renovate/renovate:36.91-slim
          caches:
            - node
            - docker
          services:
            - docker
          script:
            - export LOG_LEVEL=debug RENOVATE_CONFIG_FILE="$BITBUCKET_CLONE_DIR/renovate.js"
            - renovate

2 things to note:

• Even if you are not using bitbucket-pipelines.yml this step should be similar.
• I am using the Renovate image version renovate/renovate:36.91-slim which might not be the latest for you. you can check the latest versions of Renovate here https://hub.docker.com/r/renovate/renovate/tags

Step 6 - Getting the changelog in each Renovate PR bot to appear.

In order to get a changelog for each PR we need to add a variable to our pipeline variables on Bitbucket with the key GITHUB_COM_TOKEN and the value should be generated from GitHub.

This is a weird one 😅

How to generate the token on Github?

• Go to https://github.com/settings/tokens
• Generate a classic token

Final Step

🎉🎉 Make sure all the code is pushed on your main Git branch (for some reason it doesn't work if renovate is not on the main branch 🤷)

Final Note

I hope this guide will save you some time to set it up 💪