Renovate - Keeping extensions updated to the latest LTS

[gastaldi]

If you are an extension maintainer (part of the @quarkiverse/quarkiverse-members team), you may be wondering when would be the best time to update the Quarkus Core version used in the extension. Some teams always update to the latest and greatest (and that's fine, if it matches the team's requirements), but we usually recommend sticking to the latest LTS.

For the sake of stability, it is a common practice to have extensions depending on top of the latest Quarkus Core LTS, however keeping up with the latest LTS version may become a dauting task, because Dependabot isn't capable of distinguishing between a LTS version from other releases.

Enter Renovate. Renovate enables automated dependency updates in a much finer way, allowing teams to configure how a version is resolved instead of relying blindly on what's available in Maven Central, for example.

Enable the Renovate App in your Repository

Enable the Renovate app in your repository by submitting a PR to the quarkiverse-devops repository. Here is a sample PR: quarkiverse/quarkiverse-devops#471

Once the PR is merged, you'll be presented with a PR in your extension repository with the necessary setup (eg. quarkiverse/quarkus-prettytime#191). Go ahead and merge it.

Note

Settings from the https://github.com/quarkiverse/renovate-config repository (which includes the LTS bump strategy) will be automatically inherited.

You can override these properties in your local renovate.json file. See the Renovate docs for more information

Important

You may want to disable Dependabot (because one dependency management solution is enough) by deleting the .github/dependabot.yml file from your repository

Now Sit back and enjoy!

If you have any questions, feel free to post them here. The @quarkiverse/quarkiverse-owners team will be happy to help.

[turing85]

So... can you explain what exactly the upside of renovate compared to dependabot is? Can renovate manage "co-dependent" versions? I.e. can/does it know, which quarkus-ironjacamar version is compatible with which quarkus version and only upgrade quarkus-ironjacamar in the "correct range", depending on the quarkus-version? If so: where is this information pulled from?

[gastaldi]

I haven't tested that yet, but I believe it could be possible because renovate allows you to have custom datasource and managers (see https://github.com/quarkiverse/renovate-config/blob/main/default.json) which could extract the information from the Quarkus Registry.

[ricardozanini]

@mcruzdev to add to quarkus-jackson-jq, and quarkus-openapi-generator.

[rquinio1A]

Note: it's possible to use a renovate.json5 rather than renovate.json, to allow for comments in the file.

[cmoulliard]

Can renovate check if the Quarkus CLI version is also aligned with Quarkus LTS as we use it in some extensions and github workflows ?

[cmoulliard]

What do you mean? Isn't that defined in the quarkus-bom your extension depends on?

Yes it is defined part of the BOM but the Quarkus CLI to be installed part of the github flow don't us it. Is there a way to install using jbang the CLI using the same version as the BOM ?

[gastaldi]

AFAIK the CLI uses the same version as the app requires it, so it shouldn't be a problem if the CLI is using a version that's different from what the extension depends on, unless I am missing something

[cmoulliard]

AFAIK the CLI uses the same version as the app requires it, so it shouldn't be a problem if the CLI is using a version that's different from what the extension depends on, unless I am missing something

I agree but then how can we tell to the job that it must uses the pom XML version to install the client. This is how it is installed currently: https://github.com/quarkiverse/quarkus-argocd/blob/87764dfb90f4af5c0082a911cf766036c021a564/.github/workflows/cli-integration-test.yml#L64-L65

[gastaldi]

Something like this may help?

QUARKUS_VERSION=$(./mvnw help:evaluate -Dexpression=quarkus.version -q -DforceStdout

[cmoulliard]

This is what I did too ;-)

      - name: Extract Quarkus Version from POM
        run: |
          QUARKUS_VERSION=$(mvn help:evaluate -Dexpression=quarkus.version -q -DforceStdout)
          echo "QUARKUS_VERSION=$QUARKUS_VERSION" >> $GITHUB_ENV

      - name: Install Quarkus CLI and register the plugin
        run: |
          echo "## Install quarkus CLI - version: ${{ env.QUARKUS_VERSION }}"
          jbang app install --name quarkus --force io.quarkus:quarkus-cli:${{ env.QUARKUS_VERSION }}