prCreation: not-pending silently never opens PRs when CI only runs on pull_request

[klippx]

How are you running Renovate?

Self-hosted Renovate CLI

Which platform you running Renovate on?

GitHub.com

Which version of Renovate are you using?

43.234.2

Please tell us more about your question or problem

The docs at Suppress branch/PR creation for x days recommend this combo to hold updates for a few days:

 {
   "minimumReleaseAge": "3 days",
   "internalChecksFilter": "strict",
   "prCreation": "not-pending"
 }

We followed it, and PRs stopped opening. One scheduled run created/updated 30 branches but opened only 1 PR, despite prHourlyLimit: 5 and prConcurrentLimit: 10 despite release age being 5+ days old for all branches.

We fixed it by changing to

 {
   "minimumReleaseAge": "3 days",
   "internalChecksFilter": "strict",
   "prCreation": "immediate"
 }

Which is not in line with what the instructions document on the renovate homepage.

Root cause as we understand it:

Our CI workflows trigger only on pull_request, so a bare Renovate branch has no status checks. With prCreation: not-pending, Renovate therefore falls back to the documented rule "if there are no checks associated, Renovate will create the PR once 24 hours have elapsed since creation of the commit."

The problem is that commit creation time keeps moving: our branches get periodically re-committed (we observed all ~30 branches rewritten twice within ~2 hours), and each rewrite resets the 24h window. The result is that branches rarely survive a continuous 24h untouched, so the PRs effectively never reach the threshold. The only PR that opened belonged to a branch that happened to be 3 days old and untouched.

This is independent of minimumReleaseAge (all target versions were 5–21 days old) and of the PR limits (only 1 PR was created).

What we'd like to discuss:

1. Is not-pending simply the wrong tool when CI runs on PRs rather than branches? The "wait for tests" purpose can never be satisfied, so it only ever applies the 24h fallback.
2. Should the docs note this caveat? That not-pending provides no benefit (and can starve PR creation) when no branch-level checks exist?
3. Is the 24h fallback resetting on every branch re-commit the intended behavior? For repos whose branches are rebased/relocked frequently, this can indefinitely defer PRs.

For our setup we've switched to prCreation: immediate and kept minimumReleaseAge: "3 days" + internalChecksFilter: "strict", which preserves the "wait N days before the branch exists" behavior we actually wanted.

Logs (if relevant)

Logs

Run renovatebot/github-action@6d859fc95779be83a0335ca704879b47e5d79641
Check Renovate version
/usr/bin/docker run -t --env RENOVATE_REPOSITORIES --env RENOVATE_ALLOWED_COMMANDS --env LOG_LEVEL --env RENOVATE_TOKEN=*** --env RENOVATE_CONFIG_FILE=/github-action/renovate.json --volume /home/runner/work/my-repo/my-repo/.github/renovate.json:/github-action/renovate.json --volume /tmp:/tmp --rm ghcr.io/renovatebot/renovate:43
[10:45:27.684] INFO (8): Initializing tools all...
[10:45:28.178] INFO (8): Initialize tools all succeded in 494ms.
 INFO: Renovate started
       "renovateVersion": "43.234.2"
 INFO: Repository started (repository=my-org/my-repo)
       "renovateVersion": "43.234.2"
 INFO: Dependency extraction complete (repository=my-org/my-repo, baseBranch=main)
       "stats": {
         "managers": {
           "dockerfile": {"fileCount": 2, "depCount": 2},
           "github-actions": {"fileCount": 25, "depCount": 134},
           "npm": {"fileCount": 19, "depCount": 577}
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         "total": {"fileCount": 46, "depCount": 713}
       }
 INFO: Branch updated (repository=my-org/my-repo, branch=renovate/apollo-graphql-packages)
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 INFO: Branch updated (repository=my-org/my-repo, branch=renovate/azure-ad-microsoft-authentication-library-for-js-monorepo)
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 INFO: Branch updated (repository=my-org/my-repo, branch=renovate/semver-7.x)
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 INFO: Branch updated (repository=my-org/my-repo, branch=renovate/graphql-hive-gateway-monorepo)
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 INFO: Branch updated (repository=my-org/my-repo, branch=renovate/graphqlcodegenerator-monorepo)
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 INFO: Branch updated (repository=my-org/my-repo, branch=renovate/aws-sdk-js-v3-monorepo)
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 INFO: Branch updated (repository=my-org/my-repo, branch=renovate/azure-sdk-for-js-monorepo)
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 INFO: Branch updated (repository=my-org/my-repo, branch=renovate/biomejs-biome-2.x)
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 INFO: Branch updated (repository=my-org/my-repo, branch=renovate/faker-js-faker-10.x)
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 INFO: Branch updated (repository=my-org/my-repo, branch=renovate/graphql-hive-cli-0.x)
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 INFO: Branch updated (repository=my-org/my-repo, branch=renovate/body-parser-2.x)
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 INFO: Branch updated (repository=my-org/my-repo, branch=renovate/bullmq-5.x)
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 INFO: Branch updated (repository=my-org/my-repo, branch=renovate/fast-xml-parser-5.x)
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 INFO: Branch updated (repository=my-org/my-repo, branch=renovate/gql.tada-1.x)
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 INFO: Branch created (repository=my-org/my-repo, branch=renovate/getsentry-action-release-3.x)
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 INFO: Branch created (repository=my-org/my-repo, branch=renovate/jdx-mise-action-4.x)
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 INFO: Branch created (repository=my-org/my-repo, branch=renovate/opentelemetry)
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 INFO: Branch created (repository=my-org/my-repo, branch=renovate/sentry-javascript-monorepo)
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 INFO: Branch created (repository=my-org/my-repo, branch=renovate/yarn-monorepo)
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 INFO: Branch created (repository=my-org/my-repo, branch=renovate/major-babel-monorepo)
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 INFO: Branch created (repository=my-org/my-repo, branch=renovate/commander-15.x)
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 INFO: Branch created (repository=my-org/my-repo, branch=renovate/graphql-17.x)
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 INFO: Branch created (repository=my-org/my-repo, branch=renovate/lock-file-maintenance)
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 INFO: Repository finished (repository=my-org/my-repo)
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       "durationMs": 832839,
       "result": "done",
       "status": "activated",
       "enabled": true,
       "onboarded": true
 INFO: Renovate was run at log level "info". Set LOG_LEVEL=debug in environment variables to see extended debug logs.