Gitlab CI manager and ~latest version

[jr-elliott]

How are you running Renovate?

Self-hosted Renovate CLI

Which platform you running Renovate on?

GitLab (.com or self-hosted)

Which version of Renovate are you using?

41.173.1

Please tell us more about your question or problem

A lot of our .gitlab-ci.yml file have components included with the ~latest tag:

include:
  - component: $CI_SERVER_HOST/ci-catalog/iac/plan@~latest

From my understanding of the Renovate docs, this is considered partial semantic versioning and it should resolve to a full semantic version.

However, our Renovate runs are skipping these components entirely. I checked the Gitlab CI manager source code and it seems intentional to skip over ~latest.

Am I misconfiguring something somewhere? Is there a way to get Renovate to pin the version of the component?

Thank you.

Logs (if relevant)

Logs

               {
                 "datasource": "gitlab-tags",
                 "depName": "ci-catalog/promotion",
                 "depType": "repository",
                 "currentValue": "~latest",
                 "registryUrls": ["https://${CI_SERVER_HOST}"],
                 "versioning": "semver-partial",
                 "skipReason": "unsupported-version",
                 "updates": [],
                 "packageName": "ci-catalog/promotion"
               },

[jamietanna]

What would you expect Renovate to do with a ~latest version? What would it update to?

[jr-elliott]

I’d like it to pin the component to the latest gitlab tag. So a pin versions merge request would take

$CI_SERVER_HOST/ci-catalog/iac/plan@~latest

and make it

$CI_SERVER_HOST/ci-catalog/iac/plan@1.3.0

or whatever the latest tag/release of the component is.

[RahulGautamSingh]

The semver-partial versioning (added in #38593) fully understands ~latest:

So @~latest → @1.3.0 can be produced with rangeStrategy: pin.

The problem is in the GitLab CI manager. It assigns skipReason: unsupported-version on ~latest deps before lookup ever runs:

if (dep.currentValue === componentReferenceLatestVersion) {
  dep.skipReason = 'unsupported-version';
}

That skip was added in #26660 when component support first landed and no versioning understood ~latest. The semver-partial scheme that handles it only arrived in Oct 2025, and the skip was never revisited.

Fix: remove that skip block from Gitlab CI manager

[RahulGautamSingh]

Issue Created: #44713