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This is part two of a series that provides tips for advanced Renovate Bot users. It gives valuable tips for writing your own custom managers or custom data sources, explains why and how to self-host a Renovate Bot instance, and how to reduce friction when introducing Renovate to your teams. Originally posted on 2023-09-17, updated on 2026-08-14. Introduction to Renovate… This is part one of a two-part series that provides tips for advanced Renovate Bot users. Part 1 explains some important, basic Renovate concepts, illustrates how Renovate creates and updates PRs as a flow chart, goes into details about Renovate’s “post-upgrade tasks” feature, and reveals how to effectively diagnose Renovate issues. Originally posted on 2023-09-03, updated on 2026-08-13. Introduction to… Renovate bot (or just Renovate) is a tool that automatically updates third-party dependencies declared in your Git repository via pull requests. This Renovate cheat sheet helps teams who adopt Renovate customize the most common (and useful) configuration options, without having to know the extensive Renovate documentation. Originally posted on 2021-07-25, updated on 2026-08-12. Introduction Renovate (Bot) is a CLI tool… Renovate bot is a tool that automatically updates software dependencies declared in your Git repository via pull requests. In this Renovate introduction, I explain the benefits of automated dependency updates, how Renovate works, how to operate/run Renovate yourself (if necessary), and how you can configure its behavior for each repository. Originally posted on 2021-07-11, updated on 2026-08-11. Renovate introduction Renovate… I present the renovate-log-parser CLI. It efficiently parses large Renovate JSONL logs. It automatically finds errors in CI, reduces token usage in coding agents, and enables humans with a beautiful and efficient web UI to manually inspect errors in Renovate logs. I present an MCP server that looks up the latest stable version of tools and packages/dependencies for Docker, Helm, GitHub Actions, NPM, PyPI, NuGet, Maven/Gradle, Go, PHP, Ruby, Rust, Swift, and Dart. This article explains how to add the “lprobe” CLI tool to your container image, which executes health checks/probes triggered by the Docker daemon. In contrast to curl or other alternatives, lprobe is safe because it can only connect to localhost. It supports TCP and HTTP health checks. This article discusses 8 selection criteria for container images, why they matter, and how to evaluate them. It explains why the minimal image criterion implicitly satisfies all other 7 criteria. Finally, the selection criteria are applied to a concrete example to find the best NGINX image. This article explains how you can build your own minimal images using the CLI tools apko (Chainguard/WolfiOS), Chisel CLI (Ubuntu Chiseled), and Marinara (Azure Linux). This article provides an overview of free and open-source minimal container images for bare Linuxes (into which you would copy native binaries compiled with C/C++, Go, or Rust), PHP, Python, Java, C#, and Node.js, from the image vendors Google distroless, Chainguard, Ubuntu, and Azure Linux. It explains why minimal images matter, how they are defined, and their general pros and cons.
Renovate Bot: 4 advanced tips and tricks – Part II
Renovate Bot: 3 advanced tips and tricks – Part I
Renovate bot cheat sheet – the 12 most useful customizations
Automatic dependency updates – a Renovate Bot introduction
Renovate Log Parser – efficiently debug Renovate Bot issues
MCP server for up-to-date dependencies
Secure health checks for minimal container images
Container image security part 4: Choosing the best container image
Container image security part 3: Building custom minimal container images
Container image security part 2: Minimal images