Renovate bot - Automating Book Availability Checks
I want to keep all the dependencies in the repo up to date.
AFAIK, I have two options: Dependabot and Renovatebot.
The package manager I’m using is uv, so the first step is to check whether both tools support it.
As per https://docs.astral.sh/uv/guides/integration/dependency-bots/, as of 2025/12/10:
uv is supported by Renovate.
Dependabot has announced support for uv, but there are some use cases that are not yet working.
These issues of dependabot with uv remain open:
- https://github.com/astral-sh/uv/issues/2512
- https://github.com/dependabot/dependabot-core/issues/11913
- https://github.com/dependabot/dependabot-core/issues/13912
Based on that, Renovate is the better choice for now.
Another advantage of Renovate is its flexibility: Dependabot is GitHub specific, while Renovate supports Github, Gitlab, and Bitbucket, and can also be self-hosted.
I installed the app just for the repo in question.
Since I’m using uv, I had to enable lock file maintenance by adding a commit in the Onboarding PR.
Afterward, Renovate started creating PRs like this one.
I also wanted to observe how Renovate reacts when I push commits to one of its PRs, so I used this PR to test that behavior.
Given that I already had tests that run in the PRs, it was easy and quick to verify that the changes were correct and working.
Resources
- https://developer.mend.io/
- https://docs.astral.sh/uv/guides/integration/dependency-bots/
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKRuQkMMkOM
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CkCr9U_Q1Y
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q43LmW1b2O0
- https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate
- https://docs.renovatebot.com/reading-list/
- https://docs.renovatebot.com/configuration-options/#lockfilemaintenance
- https://github.com/renovatebot/tutorial
- https://github.blog/changelog/2022-10-24-dependabot-updates-support-for-the-python-pep-621-standard/
- https://docs.github.com/en/code-security/dependabot/dependabot-version-updates/about-dependabot-version-updates#supported-repositories-and-ecosystems
- https://docs.github.com/en/code-security/dependabot/ecosystems-supported-by-dependabot/supported-ecosystems-and-repositories