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 … Read more
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, … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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.
This article explores my Kubernetes operator that provisions Azure Pipelines agents as Kubernetes Pods. It comes with an in-depth tutorial for how to use my operator. I also explore all alternative options for running Azure Pipeline agents, and explain why using a Kubernetes-based option beats all other options. Introduction CI/CD pipelines are a cornerstone to … Read more
This article explains BuildKit caching in detail. First you learn background knowledge, e.g. how the local and remote cache differs, and what kinds of cache items BuildKit can store where. Then, BuildKit’s garbage collection is explained in detail. Finally, I present 5 tricks to speed up your image builds, e.g. tuning the garbage collection policies, … Read more
This article explains how Docker builds images with BuildKit, via buildx. It discusses the advantages of BuildKit over Docker’s legacy image builder, and then elaborates on three approaches for calling BuildKit in Docker: 1) using the embedded BuildKit library managed by the Docker daemon, 2) using a BuildKit container managed by buildx, and 3) using … Read more
In this article I compare several approaches for running compliance checks, like validating Git commit messages with a regular expression, or linting your code. I explain how these checks can either run in your IDE, in a local pre-commit hook, a remote pre-receive Git hook, or as part of your CI pipeline. I compare these … Read more
In this book recommendation, I review the second edition of the book Release It! Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software by Michael Nygard, released in 2018. I also offer my 27 page summary of the book as free download. Introduction A common misconception is that the majority of the costs in a software-based project is allocated to … Read more