PRs are wrongfully marked as edited by someone else

[erikgb]

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We are trying to onboard Renovate in https://github.com/cert-manager, but cannot use the Renovate App, as it's required to run post-upgrade tasks unsupported by the hosted installation.

Our self-hosted setup runs https://github.com/renovatebot/github-action regularly. We don't want to use long-lived PATs, and the GH_TOKEN secret cannot be given sufficient permissions. For this reason, we use https://github.com/octo-sts to exchange the GH_TOKEN secret with a stronger token, which is supplied to the Renovate action. This appears to work well, and we don't observe any issues in the Renovate logs. 🎉

The problem is that Renovate does not recognize its own commits, making the setup dysfunctional. If you look at the currently open PRs in our main project, cert-manager, you can observe that most of them are wrongfully marked as "edited by someone else" by Renovate. What's going on here, and how can we fix this? We would prefer our setup to create as little noise as possible, so I was hoping to avoid setting brute-force settings like rebaseWhen and recreateWhen.

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[erikgb]

Logs should not be required to answer my question. But as cert-manager is a public project and we run Renovate in a workflow. The logs should be available there. Example: https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/actions/runs/17508721122/job/49736767611

[RahulGautamSingh]

Logs are required so I can see who the git author is and then name of the other author which the bot thinks is someone else

[erikgb]

Ok, that makes sense. Please let me know if you need anything more to take a look at this. Thanks! ❤️

[RahulGautamSingh]

https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/actions/runs/17508721122/job/49736767611#step:7:12709

Here you will find the unrecognized author. Add it to your gitIgnoredAuthors list and the problem should be fixed.

[erikgb]

Thanks a lot! This makes so much sense. How could I overlook that from the logs? I've created cert-manager/makefile-modules#416 to fix this.

[erikgb]

@RahulGautamSingh, this will probably fix the issue, but why isn't Renovate respecting the config we set here: https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/blob/master/.github/renovate.json5#L7?

[RahulGautamSingh]

It is respecting hence the mismatch in authors. Was gitAuthor changed recently or always the same?

[erikgb]

It was changed at one point, but has been stable for some time. And if I delete the Renovate branch, this shouldn't matter. It was always failing on the second run. It seems like it's looking at the Git user (Octo STS user), and not the Git author (Renovate Bot), or both.