postUpgradeTasks and specialized environments

[menny]

Hey.
I am wondering what is the best way to support uncommon binaries in postUpgradeTasks commands.
My use-case is that I need to run Gradle (with a specific Java version) and Bazel (using Bazelisk) and need to ensure they have their caches populated.

Since self-hosted renovate is using a docker container it is not exposed to the java and bazel I install as part of my GitHub workflow setup.

I ended up passing the various environment variables and PATH to the renovate action. This seems to work but feels over-engineered.

Is there a blessed pattern to achieve my goal?

Thank you!

[viceice]

You should probably not use the action and instead run the job inside the renovate image, like we do for config validation, see:

https://github.com/renovatebot/.github/blob/main/.github/workflows/test.yml#L40-L62

Then you can prepare any tools you need before running renovate

[viceice]

you can also use the custom entry point option from the action to do something before renovate. there's a sample workflow in this repo

[viceice]

https://github.com/renovatebot/github-action/blob/main/.github%2Fworkflows%2Fbuild.yml#L113

[menny]

this is great. thank you.

[menny]

What are the benefits of using the CLI in this case? https://www.npmjs.com/package/renovate

[viceice]

What are the benefits of using the CLI in this case? https://www.npmjs.com/package/renovate

no benefit, it can't install the required tool versions on the fly.