Onboarding repos with selfhosted Forgejo and renovate running in Docker

[LeSpocky]

How are you running Renovate?

Self-hosted Renovate

If you're self-hosting Renovate, tell us which platform (GitHub, GitLab, etc) and which version of Renovate.

Forgejo, renovate:latest (Docker)

Please tell us more about your question or problem

After two hours of documentation reading I'm stuck because I have no idea how to get renovate to create the onboarding pull request. The docs say just enable the repo, but seriously: how?

What I got so far:

1. self-hosted Forgejo
2. created renovate bot user
3. created a token
4. run renovate in Docker as outlined in the docs like this

docker run --rm \
    -e RENOVATE_PLATFORM=gitea \
    -e RENOVATE_ENDPOINT=https://forge.example.com/ \
    -e RENOVATE_TOKEN=redacted \
    -e RENOVATE_GITHUB_COM_TOKEN=redacted \
    renovate/renovate --autodiscover

I read somewhere I would just have to put a file renovate.json to the repo renovate should act on and in the next run renovate would detect that file and create the onboarding PR, but this is where the docs end (I'm not even sure I got that from the docs, maybe it was some site on the internet). Tried with this json file in my repo, but it does not work:

{ }

I found no example for the minimal necessary config file, let alone a step by step guide in the docs for this kind of setup. As a first time user the documentation is not helpful (enough) here. Please assist.

Logs (if relevant)

Logs

DEBUG: No repositories were autodiscovered

[LeSpocky]

I read somewhere I would just have to put a file renovate.json to the repo renovate should act on and in the next run renovate would detect that file and create the onboarding PR, but this is where the docs end (I'm not even sure I got that from the docs, maybe it was some site on the internet). Tried with this json file in my repo, but it does not work:

{ }

Note: your renovate-config-validator thinks this is fine, see …

% docker run --rm -it -v ${PWD}/renovate.json:/tmp/renovate.json -e LOG_LEVEL=debug renovate/renovate renovate-config-validator /tmp/renovate.json
 INFO: Validating /tmp/renovate.json
 INFO: Config validated successfully

[LeSpocky]

Tried the Default Settings suggested by mend.io now. Still no PR, still this log message:

DEBUG: No repositories were autodiscovered

I used .renovaterc.json as filename as suggested in the documentation. Is this a problem? I did not want to use renovate.json because it is no hidden file, and it might confuse other repo users.

[LeSpocky]

Answering myself here after I got a hint from a colleague: you need to add the renovate bot account as a collaborator to your repo, and give it write access. After that the bot actually creates pull requests. 🥳