Not opening MRs with "Branch is 3 hours old - skipping PR creation" #14724

dominik-bln · 2022-03-18T11:38:58Z

dominik-bln
Mar 18, 2022

How are you running Renovate?

Self-hosted

If you're self-hosting Renovate, tell us what version of Renovate you run.

32.6.4

Please select which platform you are using if self-hosting.

GitLab self-hosted

If you're self-hosting Renovate, tell us what version of the platform you run.

14.8

Was this something which used to work for you, and then stopped?

It used to work, and then stopped

Describe the bug

On one project we are seeing just ~3 MRs opened and automerged during the first few renovate runs of its 24hour schedule and after that all PR creations are skipped with "Branch is 3 hours old - skipping PR creation" (as far as I could tell it's always the same "3 hours", but I didn't read the logs of all runs). There are at least 20 rate limited updates on the project. I believe this problem started a few months ago when the team adopted a schedule for renovate.

To be honest, I can't tell whether this is a misconfiguration or some unexpected interaction between configurations (my suspects are rebaseWhen, schedule and stabilityDays and the fact that we run tests only on the MR and not the branch commits). I'm pretty sure we are running into this code path:

renovate/lib/workers/repository/update/pr/index.ts

Lines 246 to 274 in 81ebad1

    
             if ((await getBranchStatus()) === BranchStatus.yellow) { 
        
               logger.debug(`Branch status is yellow - checking timeout`); 
        
               const lastCommitTime = await getBranchLastCommitTime(branchName); 
        
               const currentTime = new Date(); 
        
               const millisecondsPerHour = 1000 * 60 * 60; 
        
               const elapsedHours = Math.round( 
        
                 (currentTime.getTime() - lastCommitTime.getTime()) / millisecondsPerHour 
        
               ); 
        
               if ( 
        
                 !dependencyDashboardCheck && 
        
                 ((config.stabilityStatus && 
        
                   config.stabilityStatus !== BranchStatus.yellow) || 
        
                   elapsedHours < config.prNotPendingHours) 
        
               ) { 
        
                 logger.debug( 
        
                   `Branch is ${elapsedHours} hours old - skipping PR creation` 
        
                 ); 
        
                 return { 
        
                   type: 'without-pr', 
        
                   prBlockedBy: 'AwaitingTests', 
        
                 }; 
        
               } 
        
               const prNotPendingHours = String(config.prNotPendingHours); 
        
               logger.debug( 
        
                 `prNotPendingHours=${prNotPendingHours} threshold hit - creating PR` 
        
               ); 
        
             } 
        
             logger.debug('Branch status success'); 
        
           }

With this configuration:

{
  "branchPrefix": "ren/",
  "rebaseWhen": "behind-base-branch",
  "extends": [
    "config:base",
    "default:semanticCommits",
    "default:prConcurrentLimit20",
    "default:prHourlyLimitNone",
    "docker:enableMajor"
  ],
  "dependencyDashboard": true,
  "stabilityDays": 2,
  "prCreation": "not-pending",
  "ignorePresets": ["group:vueMonorepo"],
  "ignorePaths": ["docker-compose.override.example.yml"],
  "ignoreDeps": ["sass", "sass-loader", "cypress"],
  "platformAutomerge": true,
  "major": {
    "automerge": false
  },
  "docker": {
    "pinDigests": false
  },
  "npm": {
    "automerge": false,
    "rangeStrategy": "pin",
    "extends": [
      "default:automergePatch"
    ],
    "packageRules": [
      {
        "automerge": true,
        "labels": ["Automerge"],
        "matchDepTypes": ["devDependencies"]
      },
      {
        "groupName": "tiptap packages",
        "matchPackagePatterns": ["^tiptap"]
      },
      {
        "automerge": true,
        "labels": ["Automerge"],
        "matchUpdateTypes": ["patch", "minor"],
        "matchPackagePatterns": ["^@sentry/"]
      }
    ]
  },
  "python": {
    "enabled": true,
    "automerge": false,
    "rangeStrategy": "pin",
    "packageRules": [
      {
        "automerge": true,
        "labels": ["Automerge"],
        "matchDepTypes": ["dev-dependencies"]
      },
      {
        "automerge": true,
        "labels": ["Automerge"],
        "matchUpdateTypes": ["patch", "minor"],
        "matchPackageNames": ["boto3"]
      },
      {
        "automerge": true,
        "labels": ["Automerge"],
        "matchUpdateTypes": ["digest"],
        "matchPackageNames": ["minio/minio"]
      },
      {
        "automerge": true,
        "labels": ["Automerge"],
        "matchUpdateTypes": ["patch", "minor"],
        "matchPackagePatterns": ["^types-"]
      }
    ]
  },
  "pre-commit": {
    "enabled": true
  },
  "timezone": "Europe/Berlin",
  "updateNotScheduled": true,
  "schedule": [
    "after 8pm on Wednesday",
    "before 8pm on Thursday"
  ]
}

Any help in debugging this would be appreciated.

Relevant debug logs

Logs

Have you created a minimal reproduction repository?

No reproduction repository

Answered by rarkins

Mar 18, 2022

"prCreation": "not-pending" means "do not open a PR if any checks are still pending". "stabilityDays": 2 will mean that a branch containing any dependency less than 2 days old will have a pending status check added it by Renovate itself. I'm guessing these two factors are interacting together. If it always says 3 hours for every branch, then that's strange though.

Something else you could do is set internalChecksFilter=strict so that only versions which have passed stabilityDays will be proposed. That way you should never receive a renovate/stability-days pending check.

View full answer

rarkins · 2022-03-18T12:39:33Z

rarkins
Mar 18, 2022
Maintainer

"prCreation": "not-pending" means "do not open a PR if any checks are still pending". "stabilityDays": 2 will mean that a branch containing any dependency less than 2 days old will have a pending status check added it by Renovate itself. I'm guessing these two factors are interacting together. If it always says 3 hours for every branch, then that's strange though.

Something else you could do is set internalChecksFilter=strict so that only versions which have passed stabilityDays will be proposed. That way you should never receive a renovate/stability-days pending check.

5 replies

dominik-bln Mar 18, 2022
Author

I experimented a bit further with the project and branches via the dashboard.

We have twenty existing branches without any stability checks on the project:

The first one django-capture-on-commit-callbacks in v1.10.0 was released on January 10th. My expectation would have been for this to have gotten an MR at least yesterday during the schedule and basically all the others as well.

I also tried to force the creation of some new MRs via the dashboard now. On the first run all branches, but no MRs were created, even though the pybreaker dependency was last released on March 3rd:

For pytest with a status check, I was able to force create the MR. The ones without any status checks are just flip-flopping between "Pending Status" check and "Awaiting Schedule" on the dashboard when I try to force those.

Is it possible that somehow the empty branch pipelines are considered to block the MR creation? We are using a Gitlab feature to only run our tests when an MR is already opened.

dominik-bln Mar 18, 2022
Author

Or should every branch get the stability check? It looks to me like mainly the Python dependencies don't have the check at all 🤔

rarkins Mar 18, 2022
Maintainer

Is it possible that somehow the empty branch pipelines are considered to block the MR creation? We are using a Gitlab feature to only run our tests when an MR is already opened.

Yes, this is quite possible. You should see in the debug logs whether Renovate detects there to be an empty list or not. Such an approach does not seem compatible with prCreation=not-pending because it sounds like you've intentionally disabled all tests, so it will always be pending.

dominik-bln Mar 21, 2022
Author

I've disabled stabilityDays and prCreation=not-pending for the project now and looks like that is working (will only see fully on Thursday during the schedule).

Just an FYI, the "Merge request Pipelines" feature is pretty crucial on Gitlab CI for some features like running API tests only when files in the /api folder have changed. So having some way to define that the status checks should only be run on the already opened MRs or allow MR opening if there are no tests would be nice in that regard. Not sure if that warrants a feature request though, it probably would be pretty inconsistent behaviour with other platforms and we could still define a dummy job on the branch if we really needed the stabilityDays feature.

I'm also not 100% certain whether the status checks are working as intended, since JS dependencies always seemed to work. Shouldn't the Python deps get a "successful" stability check like the other branches and not no check at all?

Thank you for your time on this matter.

rarkins Mar 21, 2022
Maintainer

I think if we know a timestamp for a release then stabilityDays should always work (or it's a bug). If we don't have any timestamp then maybe we should treat is as "passed" too - which could be a feature request if so.

rarkins · 2022-03-18T12:41:10Z

rarkins
Mar 18, 2022
Maintainer

By the way, this was not correct to raise as a bug report and should have been raised as a discussion, so I have converted it now. If you're having trouble knowing which to raise, please just raise only discussions from now on and if something turns out to be a bug, then a bug issue can be raised after that.

1 reply

dominik-bln Mar 18, 2022
Author

Sorry, I'm mainly a Gitlab user, so wasn't aware of the discussion feature yet. I'll use that in the future.

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Not opening MRs with "Branch is 3 hours old - skipping PR creation" #14724

dominik-bln Mar 18, 2022

How are you running Renovate?

If you're self-hosting Renovate, tell us what version of Renovate you run.

Please select which platform you are using if self-hosting.

If you're self-hosting Renovate, tell us what version of the platform you run.

Was this something which used to work for you, and then stopped?

Describe the bug

Relevant debug logs

Have you created a minimal reproduction repository?

Replies: 2 comments · 6 replies

rarkins Mar 18, 2022 Maintainer

dominik-bln Mar 18, 2022 Author

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