Tuning my renovate config

hello@mikebell.io (Mike Bell) — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 12:39:48 +0000

I took some time last night to finally tune my renovate setup. There were a few issues with it - none of it renovates or my tech stacks fault, just stuff I wasn’t too happy with and things that could be improved.

If your interested in my current working config here it is.

renovate.json to default.json
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When I first setup up renovate I used renovate.json as my main config, not sure why. I’ve changed it to default.json which is recommended by the debug output in the workflow run. This also means I can have a renovate config for this specific repo, in the future I’ll be configure auto apply of patch level updates.

minimumReleaseAge
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This is a work around for the Tofu provider registers, when a new release of the AWS provider is released it takes a bit to get into the tofu registry so I’ve set this to a day to prevent broken builds.

prCreation
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This is set to not-pending this means renovate will wait till checks have passed before creating the PR, if they don’t exist then it creates the PR after 25 (odd default) hours see next.

prNotPendingHours
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This is set to1 hour, I don’t need to wait 25 hours for the PR to be created if there are no checks, I think this is the lowest it will go.

dependencyDashboard
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This is set to true. It creates an issue in each repo with the dependancy dashboard. I’m not sure I like it so will probably disable it moving forward.

Renovate config is really powerful and I’m only just scratching the surface with it. Hopefully this gives you a bit of an idea at what it can do and how you can shape it to your own requirements.

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Tuning my renovate config

renovate.json to default.json #

minimumReleaseAge #

prCreation #

prNotPendingHours #

dependencyDashboard #

renovate.json to default.json
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minimumReleaseAge
#

prCreation
#

prNotPendingHours
#

dependencyDashboard
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