Can I order a suppressor now without begging the ATF for permission??

The silver lining in the BBB?!

GM nostr! Hint of the day for the devs out there: I was heavily reliant on Dependabot to keep my project's software versions up to date (you are keeping your dependencies up to date, right?).

Some colleagues who are deeper into OSS told me to try Renovate, but I mostly dismissed it as just alt tech.

Now that I’m working on some software outside of GitHub, I decided to give it a go. And I have to say: folks were right. Renovate is just... better. It does pretty much everything I need out of the box, and it avoids a lot of manual work or extra CI steps that Dependabot requires.

Here are some of my favourite features (in no particular order):

- Works much better with monorepos out of the box

- Great (and I mean it) presets

- Has a nice dashboard to track what's going on

- In the JVM ecosystem, it upgrades Gradle and Maven Wrapper versions

- Same for Go, it upgrades the Go version in go.mod

- It can pin versions in ecosystems where that's best practice (including, somewhat Ironically, GitHub Actions)

- Has better confidence metrics and update recommendations compared to Dependabot

- First-party integration with OSV (though you can also use GitHub’s Advisory Database, which, credit where it's due, is a great and convenient resource)

- Requires way less YAML fluff to auto-approve and auto-merge PRs after CI passes (Assuming you do have proper tests and checks running, which you do right? Right???)

And the big one: it works everywhere.

On most platforms Renovate already offers its own Bots and integration tooling, but you can also use the CLI or even run / selfhost your own bot.

In most cases, all you need to do is install the Renovate bot and drop a renovate.json like the one below into your repo. Then just sit back and watch the magic happen.

You can customise a gazillion settings to your heart’s content, but unlike GitHub Actions + Dependabot combos, I didn’t need to write loads of config to get it working the way I wantm My go-to renovate.json is just 5 lines of config at the moment.

Definitely worth checking out!