renovate VS hadolint

There is no built-in Renovate Bot on a self-hosted GitLab. What can we do to set it up and enjoy all the benefits of automatic dependency updates?

> Yes, it is awesome until you have to sysadmin it, apply updates, patch it, fix security holes, etc. I am not saying all self-hosted solutions are like that. There are exceptions. However, the majority of open-source self-hosted solutions require a lot of extra work.

I'm currently self-hosting 10 different applications on my local server, which represents everything I've ever seen that looked fun or useful to me. Every one of them had a Docker image with an example compose file, which means updating them just requires periodically running Renovate [0] on the repo that stores all my compose files and then running a script that docker compose pulls the updates. It takes maybe 10 minutes every other week, and is actually kinda fun.

It helps that all the apps are only accessible from within my VPN, so I'm not too worried about fixing security updates within a tiny time window.

[0] https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate

This is a big deal! Where did you read this? I found:

https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate/discussions/26917

Renovate is an automated dependency management tool that can be used to keep your dependencies up-to-date. It can be configured to automatically create pull requests to update your dependencies, and it supports a wide range of package managers and platforms.

To get started with Mend Renovate, the comprehensive official documentation provides detailed instructions on installation, configuration, and best practices. Additionally, the Mend Renovate community forum offers a platform for users to connect, share experiences, and access the collective knowledge base.

It is a good practice to keep software up to date. To track changes in upstream software, we can utilize automatic dependency tracking systems such as Dependabot or Renovate. This is a broad topic and requires a separate article to be covered. If you would like to read about it, please vote in the comments section below.

So do other forges: I have Renovate [0] set up on my self-hosted Forgejo and it's worked great so far.

[0] https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate

You can ease some of the burden for yourself though using tooling. If you are using GitHub, dependabot can be configured to make automatic PRs to your repo whenever there are dependencies to update. If you're not a GitHub user, you can use renovate which even supports self hosting.

Hello! I'm using Helm in K8s and curious if there is a solution that could keep tabs on the deployed chart dependency versions and either alert us when something is out of date or when a new release is available. Does this exist? I was thinking something like Dependabot or Renovate, but neither seems to be able to manage this.

To skip the "move your scripts to standalone files" step some devs don't like, consider something like https://github.com/hadolint/hadolint which runs Shellcheck over inline scripts within Containerfiles.

This is neat :)

I love going and making containers smaller and faster to build.

I don't know if it's useful for alpine, but adding a --mount=type=cache argument to the RUN command that `apk add`s might shave a few seconds off rebuilds. Probably not worth it, in your case, unless you're invalidating the cached layer often (adding or removing deps, intentionally building without layer caching to ensure you have the latest packages).

Hadolint is another tool worth checking out if you like spending time messing with Dockerfiles: https://github.com/hadolint/hadolint

With Depot, we make use of two Dockerfile linters, hadolint and a set of Dockerfile linter rules that Semgrep has written to make a bit of a smarter Dockerfile linter.

# Download hadolint wget https://github.com/hadolint/hadolint/releases/download/v2.12.0/hadolint-Linux-x86_64 # Download SHA256 checksum wget https://github.com/hadolint/hadolint/releases/download/v2.12.0/hadolint-Linux-x86_64.sha256 # Validate the checksum sha256sum -c hadolint-Linux-x86_64.sha256 # Make the file executable chmod + ./hadolint-Linux-x86_64 # Rename the file mv hadolint-Linux-x86_64 hadolint

The most common linter I've seen and used it Hadolint, which does: https://github.com/hadolint/hadolint/wiki/DL3002 I didn't bother checking to see if alternatives also support this as well though.

Some discussion on that here:

https://github.com/koalaman/shellcheck/issues/58

The hadolint project does shell checking for Dockerfiles and it uses shellcheck:

https://github.com/hadolint/hadolint

So the approach is definitely feasible, but you do need a new project and probably it needs to be written in Haskell.

how does this compare to something like hadolint?

Also, have you run across Hadolint for linting? https://github.com/hadolint/hadolint