Renovate fails to automerge

[MikeMcC399]

Situation

The renovate.json configuration controls how dependencies are updated by Renovate (see Renovate configuration overview).

Although Renovate is set to automerge, this is not effective and all Renovate PRs wait for manual approval.

github-action/renovate.json

Lines 6 to 9 in 945856d

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

The Renovate documentation discusses this restriction under Required Pull Request reviews, although the advice may be outdated, as GitHub now offers rulesets in addition to classic branch protection rules.

Suggestion

The Cypress.io team should investigate if the advice to allow Renovate automerge can be implemented:

If you're on github.com or GitHub Enterprise Server (>=3.4) you can let Renovate bypass the mandatory Pull Request reviews using the "Allow specified actors to bypass required pull requests" option in your branch protection rules.

Note that the link Allow specified actors to bypass required pull requests concerns a GitHub blog post from Nov 2021 which describes the use of classic branch protections rules:

https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/configuring-branches-and-merges-in-your-repository/managing-protected-branches/managing-a-branch-protection-rule describes:

Optionally, to allow specific actors to push code to the branch without creating pull requests when they're required, select Allow specified actors to bypass required pull requests. Then, search for and select the actors who should be allowed to skip creating a pull request.

In the meantime GitHub now offers rulesets including the ability to bypass.

This repo currently has no rulesets defined. See https://github.com/cypress-io/github-action/rules

[MikeMcC399]

https://github.com/apps/renovate-approve may be the solution

Before automating merge, Renovate should have established itself as reliable over a space of a couple of months. If every PR produced by Renovate, that passes tests, only needs to be approved, and not modified or rejected, then this is a good sign for automating merge from Renovate.

[MikeMcC399]

I'm going to close this for the moment.

https://developer.mend.io/github/cypress-io/github-action is showing that Renovate PR creation is not enabled, so there are some basic configuration issues that need to be resolved first.

[MikeMcC399]

@mschile

Have you by any chance installed and enabled the renovate-bot?

I'm seeing #1720 now approved by Renovate which wasn't happening before.

[mschile]

@MikeMcC399, yes, I added the renovate-approve bot but I'm not sure why it wasn't auto-merged. I'll have to look into it.

[MikeMcC399]

@mschile

That all makes sense now! I apologize for the confusing message I sent by re-opening this issue! I'll close it again now.

I'd expect the automerge to kick in the next time Renovate runs. It always takes more than one run of Renovate to go through the whole automerge cycle.