Updating pre-commit additional dependencies using Renovate
I am a huge fan of Renovate Bot to automatically update dependencies in projects. I use it in all my projects. At the time when I discovered it, we were using GitLab so we could not use dependabot.
In general, I quickly realized that Renovate Bot has significant advantages over dependabot (which, if I am not mistaken, is restricted to running on GitHub). Renovate is fully open source (and can be self-hosted), highly configurable, supports many dependency managers, supports custom managers with regex, and much more.
Renovate has been having beta pre-commit support for quite some time which needs to be enabled explicitly.
I have been using it for a while and it works great in keeping up-to-date with updates to pre-commit hooks (it is generally recommended to pin dependencies).
pre-commit hooks can have additional dependencies.
These additional dependencies are specific to the language the hook uses.
For example, let's assume you are using mdformat to format your Markdown files which supports additional plugins.
mdformat is a Python tool so the additional dependencies are Python packages.
Here is an example pre-commit config that this website uses as of this writing:
- repo: https://github.com/executablebooks/mdformat
rev: 1.0.0
hooks:
- id: mdformat
language: python
args: [--number, --sort-front-matter, --strict-front-matter]
additional_dependencies:
- mdformat-mkdocs==5.1.4
- mdformat-front-matters==2.0.0
- mdformat-footnote==0.1.3
- mdformat-gfm-alerts==2.0.0
- mdformat-ruff==0.1.3
- ruff==0.15.4
- mdformat-config==0.2.1
- Specifying the language is optional but important here as you will see when you keep reading.
How can we ensure that the additional dependencies receive get updated automatically as well?