Backstage: How to set up Renovate

Ever struggled to set up Renovate with Backstage repositories?

You are not alone! 🤗

I have created a set of Renovate presets over the last few months that can be used to configure Renovate for Backstage repositories, which I want to share with you today.

Why

Renovate is a great tool to keep your dependencies up-to-date. But it can be a bit tricky to set up Renovate as it comes with a lot of knobs and configurations. This is especially true for Backstage repositories, as they have a specific structure and expect to have dependencies updated in a specific way.

What does it do?

The provided presets are opinionated and are meant to be used for Backstage repositories. They contain a set of rules that are meant to be used for most Backstage setups.

These features include:

• Renovate based upgrades to the latest Backstage release
• Group Backstage updates together
• Prevent upgrades to frameworks that are not supported by Backstage
• Group all PRs based on the plugin. Therefore, all updates of the catalog are grouped together including catalog, catalog-backend and so on

Usage

To use these presets, you need simply to add a new extends entry to your renovate.json file. Here is an example of how to use the default preset which will work for any Renovate instance whether it is self-hosted or not:

{
  "extends": [
    "github>secustor/backstage-renovate-config"
  ]
}

If you want to use specific features of the hosted Mend App or you are self-hosting Backstage then you can choose the specific preset like this:

{
  "extends": [
    "github>secustor/backstage-renovate-config:self-hosted.json5"
  ]
}

A real life example of how to use this, can be found in my Backstage plugins repo secustor/backstage-plugins

For more information on how to configure Renovate presets, see the Renovate documentation

And that’s it! 🎉

If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to reach out to me via issues on the Github repository secustor/backstage-renovate-config.