Feature request: pre-commit hook to create/link external tracking issues (Jira, ServiceNow, etc.) before commit/PR creation

[KaanSimsek]

Tell us more.

Use case

In regulated environments (e.g. SOX, ISO 27001, financial/healthcare compliance),
every commit and PR/MR is required to be traceable to a tracked work item in an
external system (Jira, ServiceNow, Azure Boards, etc.) before the commit is made
— not just linked afterward.

Currently Renovate has no hook point before PR/commit creation to call out to an
external ticketing system and inject the resulting ticket key into the commit
message and/or PR title. This means compliance-focused orgs either have to:

1. Build a separate wrapper that dry-runs Renovate, pre-creates tickets, and
   re-injects config per-package (fragile — dry-run log format isn't a stable API)
2. Post-process PRs after creation and amend commits to inject the ticket key
   (requires force-pushing to PR branches, awkward in CI)
3. Fork Renovate and patch ensurePr() directly (works, but creates ongoing
   maintenance burden tracking upstream changes)

Proposed solution

A configurable hook/webhook point that runs before commit creation,
with access to the resolved branch config (depName, currentVersion, newVersion,
updateType, isVulnerabilityAlert, etc.), that can:

• Call an external API (Jira, etc.)
• Return a value (e.g. ticket key) that gets interpolated into commitMessage,
  prTitle, and/or branchName templates

Something like:

{
  "preCommitHook": {
    "enabled": true,
    "command": "./scripts/create-jira-ticket.sh",
    "injectAs": "JIRA_TICKET"
  },
  "commitMessagePrefix": "{{JIRA_TICKET}}:"
}

This could be scoped via existing packageRules matchers, so orgs could apply it
only to certain update types (e.g. isVulnerabilityAlert only, or majors only).

Why this matters beyond my specific case

This isn't Jira-specific — any org with change-management requirements
(ITIL, SOX, FDA-regulated software, etc.) needs commits/PRs traceable to an
approved work item. A generic pre-commit hook would let people plug in Jira,
ServiceNow, Azure Boards, or an internal system without Renovate needing to
natively support any specific ticketing API.

Happy to contribute a PR if there's appetite for this and maintainers can point
me to the right place in the codebase.