How to enable only set of managers when combining presets

[norman-zon]

How are you running Renovate?

Self-hosted Renovate

If you're self-hosting Renovate, tell us which platform (GitHub, GitLab, etc) and which version of Renovate.

GitHub, Renovate 41.35.0

Please tell us more about your question or problem

Hi,

I just started writing my own Renovate presets to avoid duplication of config across repos.

My goal is to only enable managers explicitly. Without presets I used enabledManagers and listed all managers explicitly.

But the enabledManagers array does not seem to be mergeable. So when using multiple presets, I cannot add

{
  "enabledManagers": ["managerForThisPreset"]
}

to each preset and get a merged list in the final config.

I also tried having a default.json preset, that sets

{
  "enabledManagers": []
}

and then setting

{
  "managerForThisPreset": {
    "enabled": true
  },
}

in each other preset.

But in this case all managers get enabled, the [] for enabledManagers does not disable all managers, that are not explicitly enabled.

How can I achieve my goal of only enabling selected manages when using presets?

Logs (if relevant)

Logs

Replace this text with your logs, between the starting and ending triple backticks

[rarkins]

enabledManagers is non-mergeable, which was a design choice. And because it's in wide use now, it's unlikely that we'd ever change its behavior. It would need to be a new feature like additionalEnabledManagers similar to what we do with labels and additionalLabels.

However you should also consider using packageRules instead of enabledManagers. The only difference is that enabledManagers totally stops the manager's package files from being parsed, which is quite unnecessary because parsing is very fast (typically < 1s). You could do something like this:

• Default rule of matchManagers=*, enabled=false
• Subsequent rules like matchManagers=npm, enabled=true

These subsequent rules would complement each other, essentially like "merge".

[RahulGautamSingh]

Please create a test repo. i will fork and try

[norman-zon]

I have a reproduction here. Looking forward to your input.
What I don't understand in this specific case is why the tflint manager is listed in the Dashboard Issue instead of being completely disabled. Also like, described above, negative matching won't help with the general approach of enabling managers additive through combination of presets.

[norman-zon]

Could someone please take a look on this? I am still stuck. Thanks

[RahulGautamSingh]

packageRules merge across presets, so the confusion is two separate things looking like one.

1. Mix-and-match works if you keep it all in packageRules (not the non-mergeable enabledManagers):

Base preset:

{ "packageRules": [ { "matchPackageNames": ["*"], "enabled": false } ] }

Per-type preset:

{ "packageRules": [ { "matchManagers": ["dockerfile"], "enabled": true } ] }

Consumer:

{ "extends": ["local>you/presets:base", "local>you/presets:dockerfile"] }

Merged rules become [disable-all, enable-dockerfile], evaluated in order → only dockerfile enabled. Add presets to enable more. No inverse ! matching needed.

2. The tflint dashboard entry isn't a disable failure.

Your .tflint.hcl uses the terraform plugin, which is bundled with TFLint and has no source. Renovate marks sourceless plugins skipReason: no-source at extraction, regardless of enable/disable .. it never produces updates either way.

The Detected Dependencies section hides the skipped dep but still shows its manager/file skeleton.
(tflint-plugin (1) → .tflint.hcl, empty).

That's cosmetic; tflint is doing nothing. Your disable rule is working.

[norman-zon]

Thank you so much for clarifying.
I just didn't get that parsing still happens, even when all managers are disabled with packageRules. I can absolutely live with all possibly applicable managers showing up in the Detected Dependencies.

[github-actions[bot]]

Hi there,

Please locate the debug message packageFiles with updates in your logs and paste the contents here. Depending on your question, we may need the full list of packages or only one.

If you self-host Renovate: make sure you run Renovate with LOG_LEVEL=debug to get the debug log messages! Next, open the debug-level logs and search for packageFiles with updates. This text marks the start of a structured log message that shows every package file, dependency, and update that Renovate found.

Find the relevant dependency/dependencies in the log message, and copy/paste those parts into this discussion. If you do not know which bits we need, you can copy/paste the full log message.

Read the Renovate docs, Troubleshooting to learn more about getting the docs, and getting the correct type of logs.

Thanks, the Renovate team

[github-actions[bot]]

Hi there,

This is intended as a polite, automated request that users avoid @ mentioning repository maintainers like @rarkins or @viceice. Doing so causes annoying mobile notifications and makes it harder to maintain this repository.

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