Maintenance
Renovatebot
We use renovatebot to update our dependencies and versions automatically. Renovate creates merge requests on Gitlab. Depending on the version change (major/minor/patch), project and type of dependency, some of these will be merged automatically when their pipeline succeeds.
Renovate runs once every night. Sometimes it can be convenient to do an extra
run. You can do so from the Gitlab UI
<https://open.greenhost.net/stackspin/renovate-config/-/pipelines/new>. If you
only need it to handle a single repo, you can do so via an env var:
RENOVATE_AUTODISCOVER_FILTER=stackspin/stackspin for example.
Gitlab token refreshing
Since 2024, Gitlab no longer allows creating access tokens that are valid indefinitely, so we have to refresh those once a year to keep things running.
CREATE_VPS_TOKEN
In the Gitlab CI pipeline for the main stackspin project, we use a project access token so the CI script can determine via the Gitlab API which CI jobs are part of the current pipeline. It uses that information to determine which apps are being installed in this run, and calculates a matching VPS size.
To refresh this token:
Go to the project access tokens page.
Create a new project access token there, with
read_apiscope.Copy the token value and set it as the value of
CREATE_VPS_TOKENin the project’s CI variables.