How to use minimumReleaseAge without burning up your CI minutes?

[BenjaminBeeker]

How are you running Renovate?

Self-hosted Renovate CLI

Which platform you running Renovate on?

GitLab (.com or self-hosted)

Which version of Renovate are you using?

43.99

Please tell us more about your question or problem

I am using minimumReleaseAge=14 days, have internalChecksFilter=strict and prCreation=not-pending.
My pipelines are configured to run on main branch, version tags and merge-requests.
Before i updated renovate from 41 to 43, it worked perfectly.
Since the update no more MRs are being created (branches are created), with the information in the logs Successful checks are all internal renovate/ checks, so returning "pending" branch status.

The only workaround would be to add a job, which only runs in renovate branches, doing nothing. But even a job just outputting one echo command chews down the CI minutes significantly when you have a bunch of projects with a dozen npm dependencies, rebasing all the branches on each merge, while they wait for their 14 days.
Apart from chewing down the CI minutes, i simply don't think it is a good approach to have to run a job just to make renovate create the MR.

I searched the documentation but could not find any way to get it to work. The only related discussion i could find was #39242, with the "workaround" to just create the PR immediate, which results in the exact same issue of burning CI Minutes and might on top block other updates if there is a limit of open renovate PRs configured.

i also saw the prNotPendingHours option, which is disabled when minimumReleaseAge is set. In my opinion it could be a way to fix the issue, if this option is not disabled but set to at least the minimumReleaseAge (or only disabled if it is smaller than the minimumReleaseAge with a warning)

Is there any way to not burn my CI Minutes while using minimumReleaseAge etc?

Logs (if relevant)

No response

[itxashancode]

minimumReleaseAge only works if you have at least one non-internal check in internalChecksFilter. The issue is that renovate/ checks are internal, so with strict filtering they're ignored - meaning no "successful" checks exist to trigger MR creation. That's why it's stuck in pending.

You have two real options:

1. Add one real external check to internalChecksFilter (e.g. your test suite) so it can pass and trigger the MR after 14 days.

2. Set prNotPendingHours=336 (14 days) alongside minimumReleaseAge. This forces the MR to be created after the time window regardless of check status. It's not in the docs because it's a bit of a hack, but it works - I've used it in similar setups.

The echo-job workaround is technically valid but wasteful. Option 2 is cleaner if you can't surface a real check.