Ability to ignore specified git authors for the purpose of branch.isModified() check

[napei]

What would you like Renovate to be able to do?

From here: #8633 (reply in thread)

In some of my projects I have a bot account which makes commits through an action on PRs which updates golang module files and bazel files with gazelle. These commits are necessary in most cases to allow bazel to build properly. They are also tracked with a checksum file so that builds will fail if dependencies haven't been updated properly, but that's not relevant to renovate.

Currently I have to not use the bot as the git author because renovate won't auto-close PRs if, for example, I update the dependency in main. The current workaround is to just re-use the renovate git author and then it will be deleted and recreated as renovate rebases. (I haven't specifically tested whether the bot affects rebases).

It would be nice to be able to specify a list of git authors that renovate can treat as bot commits or maybe even something in the commit message that could be parsed like [renovate-ignore].

Did you already have any implementation ideas?

A configuration option like

{
  "ignoredAuthors": [
   "Bot Account <[email protected]>",
   "Another Bot <[email protected]>"
  ]
}

or

{
  "commitIgnoreKeyword": "[renovate-ignore]"
}

[rarkins]

I think an option for authors makes sense. Ignored authors or allowed authors?

One challenge is we only look at the head commit in a branch. If the head commit is an allowed author but any ones before they were a human making manual changes then they'd be lost.

Still, allowing authors would work better than nothing we have today.

[napei]

Could you look at every commit instead of the head or is that out of scope?

I suppose it's pretty much a known fact that it's an automated PR and that people making changes to it would have to be aware that if it gets rebased automatically then their changes will disappear.

I would also say ignored authors, as you would ignore them when checking if a branch can be autoclosed. Anyone is "allowed" to commit.

[rarkins]

There's a lot of performance gains from doing a shallow clone, so we don't have all commits to look at.

[napei]

There's a lot of performance gains from doing a shallow clone, so we don't have all commits to look at.

Fair enough then. Perhaps just a disclaimer that get's added to the PR if HEAD isn't an ignored author?

[rarkins]

That already happens

[napei]

That already happens

My bad. So yes basically just a list of ignored authors then.

[rarkins]

Related - but a separate topic - I've considered adding a checkbox in PRs that instructs renovate to stop updating the branch/PR

[renovate-release]

🎉 This issue has been resolved in version 24.82.0 🎉

The release is available on:

• GitHub release
• 24.82.0

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