Support relative paths for config presets

[remal]

What would you like Renovate to be able to do?

We have several repositories that have the same files automatically synchronized between them. Renovate's config is one of them.

It would be cool if we could use relative paths in shared config presets. It would allow us to use synchronized base Renovate config and included repository specific preset.

If you have any ideas on how this should be implemented, please tell us here.

If extends section has a value starting with ./ or ../, it should be treated as a relative path and loaded accordingly.

Is this a feature you are interested in implementing yourself?

Maybe

[rarkins]

What would the syntax look like?

[remal]

@rarkins If extends section has a value starting with ./ or ../, it should be treated as a relative path to the current config file.

However, I'm not sure how nested extends works (when an included file includes another file), there can be some difficulties here.

[viceice]

the main difficulty is that preset does know anything about paths at all, that info is only available on platform code, bit that doesn't know anything about parent preset.

[remal]

We can live without this feature (with some hacks), but we'd appreciate it if Renovate teams implemented it. However, I understand that it may take a lot of time to implement, and not many users need this feature, so it's not a high priority.

[github-actions[bot]]

Hi there,

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Good luck,

The Renovate team

[Kariton]

Hey,
i just tried to archive the same thing.

Reason is that i host my repo locally on my selfhosted gitlab with selfhosted renovate
and want to mirror my repo to github.

but my references to renovate extends do not work outside of my internal network and i also dont want to include the relevant (gitlab) internal path information publicly.

maybe something like local-path as absolute path from repo root would be a feasible way to include those files from within the repository.

[ulgens]

+1 for the request.

I need a simple way to say "extend using this file from the same directory" and I was expecting it to be an easy thing, but it seems that you need to define a repo and git ref all the time, otherwise it just falls back to the default branch. While doing development on a repo with multiple smaller configs, like https://github.com/ulgens/renovate-presets, lack of a simple ./ approach makes the development experience unnecessarily painful.

[rainecheck]

Similar use case here. I'm trying to configure a process to test renovate configuration changes from a fork, and my configs reference sub-files, e.g.

For a repo renovateconfig with a fork `renovateconfig-test1:

{
  "description": "Orchestrator for FOO modular Renovate configuration. Extends specialized sub-configs per file type or other grouping.",
  "$schema": "https://docs.renovatebot.com/renovate-schema.json",
  "extends": [
    "local>FOO/renovateconfig",
    "local>FOO/renovateconfig:FUNC/BAR",
    "local>FOO/renovateconfig:FUNC/BAZ",
    "local>FOO/renovateconfig:FUNC/QUX",
    "local>FOO/renovateconfig:FUNC/groups"
  ]
}

If I want to have my team's development instances targeting the files FUNC/<file>, the file has the repo name hardcoded in it. The only way I can figure to get it working right now would be to replace the FOO with something like {{ env.RENOVATE_PRESET }} and setting that environment variable on the renovate image that's running.

Having it instead be this, would be much tidier:

{
  "description": "Orchestrator for FOO modular Renovate configuration. Extends specialized sub-configs per file type or other grouping.",
  "$schema": "https://docs.renovatebot.com/renovate-schema.json",
  "extends": [
    "internal>./default",
    "internal>./FUNC/BAR",
    "internal>./FUNC/BAZ",
    "internal>./FUNC/QUX",
    "internal>./FUNC/groups"
  ]
}

That would mean that if the caller calls local>FOO/renovateconfig:default, they get the main config, and if they call local>FOO/renovateconfig-test:default they get the config in test before it's PRd from the fork.