Consider treating various GitLab configuration issues as errors rather than warnings

[wleese]

Tell us more.

My company has over 1200 GitLab repositories, most of which have Renovate configured for dependency management.

Recently we discovered that approximately 200 were misconfigured (or broke over time) in various ways, but issues were never detected because Renovate exits successfully in almost any situation.

The most common examples have been:

• Failure to configure a token: "You must configure a GitLab personal access token"
• Token does not have sufficient permissions: "You are not allowed to push code to this project. The requested URL returned error: 403"
• Specific push rules that conflict with how Renovate creates the merge request: "remote: GitLab: Commit message does not follow the pattern xxx'\nerror: failed to push some refs to"
• Committer requirements prevent the Renovate 'bot' from pushing: "To https://redacted@renovateapp.com'. You can only push commits if the committer email is one of your own verified emails.\nerror: failed to push some refs to 'xxx'"

All these situations are currently "WARN" messages that Renovate will happily ignore. The functional effect here however is that no merge requests for dependency updates will be created. Because there is no signal for the user to detect that there is an issue (no one checks logs unless they're triggered to do so), these issues will spread unnoticed for a long long time.

I'd like to request either the default to be changed to consider these issues as errors, or a simple mechanism provided that users of Renovate can "opt-in" to to allow more 'strict' behavior.

I'm aware of the log mapping feature, but using it to map all possible 'error' conditions will become a game of whack-a-mole.

[breun]

It is indeed quite confusing to see Renovate call something an error ("Error updating branch"), logging it as a warning ("WARN:") and printing a JSON field called "err" (error) along with it.

And apart from the error vs warning confusion, seeing the Renovate job being labeled as "successful" by your CI tooling, even though things clearly didn't work.

WARN: Error updating branch (repository=path/to/repo, branch=renovate/foo.version)
       "err": {
         "task": {
           "commands": [
             "push",
             "origin",
             "renovate/foo.version:renovate/foo.version",
             "--force-with-lease",
             "-u",
             "--no-verify",
             "--verbose",
             "--porcelain"
           ],
           "format": "utf-8",
           "parser": "[function]"
         },
         "message": "To https://**redacted**@renovateapp.com'/ is not a member of team\nerror: failed to push some refs to 'https://gitlab.example.com/path/to/repo.git'\n",
         "stack": "Error: To https://**redacted**@renovateapp.com'/ is not a member of team\nerror: failed to push some refs to '[https://**redacted**@3.27.0/node_modules/simple-git/src/lib/plugins/error-detection.plugin.ts:42:29](https://**redacted**@3.27.0.0/node_modules/simple-git/src/lib/plugins/error-detection.plugin.ts:42:29))\n    at PluginStore.exec (/usr/local/renovate/node_modules/.pnpm/simple-git@3.27.0/node_modules/simple-git/src/lib/plugins/plugin-store.ts:54:29)\n    at /usr/local/renovate/node_modules/.pnpm/simple-git@3.27.0/node_modules/simple-git/src/lib/runners/git-executor-chain.ts:124:42\n    at new Promise (<anonymous>)\n    at GitExecutorChain.handleTaskData (/usr/local/renovate/node_modules/.pnpm/simple-git@3.27.0/node_modules/simple-git/src/lib/runners/git-executor-chain.ts:121:14)\n    at GitExecutorChain.<anonymous> (/usr/local/renovate/node_modules/.pnpm/simple-git@3.27.0/node_modules/simple-git/src/lib/runners/git-executor-chain.ts:97:40)\n    at Generator.next (<anonymous>)\n    at fulfilled (/usr/local/renovate/node_modules/.pnpm/simple-git@3.27.0/node_modules/simple-git/dist/cjs/index.js:52:24)\n    at processTicksAndRejections (node:internal/process/task_queues:105:5)"
       }