Here’s a step by step guide to using Renovate with Gitlab. These notes are based on the Renovate Runner’s documentation. The documentation is complete, but still required me to wonder how exactly to set it up. This is probably my fault, but if you’re like me, this guide will help you set it up without thinking much. Create a gitlab account for your Renovate runner Just register an account at Gitlab, eg my-renovate-bot-account.

Gitlab limited the number of CI minutes freely available, and although I’m working on an opensource project and could possibly apply to get more free minutes, I decided not to if possible. I’m happy to be able to use their service freely, and in their competition with a megacorp, I’d rather not participate in unnecessarily using their limited financial means. Most deployment of Gitlab Runners are probably done on servers, but the workstation I’m developing on has a lot of spare resources, which I would be happy to use to run CI jobs.

Here’s an easy workflow to use the container registry make available to Gitlab projects. You first need to create a token. A Personal Access Token is usable with any project you have access to. A Deploy token is scoped to a group or a project. Personal Access Token If you decide to use a Personal Access Token you first need to create one with the api access. As mentioned in the doc, you can do this on the gitlab.