PR never created using "schedule:monthly" config

[benj-dobs]

How are you running Renovate?

Mend Renovate hosted app on github.com

If you're self-hosting Renovate, tell us what version of Renovate you run.

No response

If you're self-hosting Renovate, select which platform you are using.

None

Was this something which used to work for you, and then stopped?

It used to work, and then stopped

Wanted end result.

My Renovate config extends schedule:monthly, which is defined as "before 4am on the first day of the month". Unfortunately, Renovate does not appear to run on that schedule - so it never opens a pull request for those updates. I would expect Renovate to open pull requests on the schedule I chose - especially given that it's a preset schedule.

Today is the first day of the month. The logs show that renovate ran with "reason: monthly" at 06:33:19.

What you tried so far.

I have some packageRules set up with schedules such as * 0-5 8 * *. These seem to work most of the time.

Relevant debug logs

Logs

DEBUG: branch.isUpToDate(): needs recalculation (branch="renovate/yarn-3.x")
DEBUG: getBranchPr(renovate/yarn-3.x) (branch="renovate/yarn-3.x")
DEBUG: findPr(renovate/yarn-3.x, undefined, open) (branch="renovate/yarn-3.x")
DEBUG: findPr(renovate/yarn-3.x, undefined, closed) (branch="renovate/yarn-3.x")
DEBUG: branchExists=true (branch="renovate/yarn-3.x")
DEBUG: dependencyDashboardCheck=undefined (branch="renovate/yarn-3.x")
DEBUG: Check for closed PR because recreating closed PRs is disabled. (branch="renovate/yarn-3.x")
DEBUG: findPr(renovate/yarn-3.x, Bump Yarn to v3.6.1, !open) (branch="renovate/yarn-3.x")
DEBUG: prAlreadyExisted=false (branch="renovate/yarn-3.x")
DEBUG: Checking if PR has been edited (branch="renovate/yarn-3.x")
DEBUG: branch.isModified(): using cached result "false" (branch="renovate/yarn-3.x")
DEBUG: Checking schedule(before 4am on the first day of the month, null) (branch="renovate/yarn-3.x")
DEBUG: Checking 1 schedule(s) (branch="renovate/yarn-3.x")
DEBUG: Checking schedule "before 4am on the first day of the month" (branch="renovate/yarn-3.x")
{
  "parsedSchedule": {
    "schedules": [
      {
        "t_b": [
          14400
        ],
        "D": [
          1
        ]
      }
    ],
    "exceptions": [],
    "error": -1
  }
}

DEBUG: Package not scheduled (branch="renovate/yarn-3.x")
DEBUG: Skipping PR creation out of schedule (branch="renovate/yarn-3.x")

[rarkins]

Please give the repo name or a recent job ID

[benj-dobs]

Job ID 0189ae80-afc3-796d-b1c5-846c4a6a2249 (private repo)

[epage]

Unsure if my case is related or not. RenovateBot has been suspiciously quiet at least this month and I think last month as well.

I saw someone create a PR to update a dependency which meant it wasn't just all of my dependency maintainers were on vacation :)

I then checked the log and I'm getting

DEBUG: Checking schedule "before 3am on the first day of the month" (branch="renovate/rust-1.x")
{
  "parsedSchedule": {
    "schedules": [
      {
        "t_b": [
          10800
        ],
        "D": [
          1
        ]
      }
    ],
    "exceptions": [],
    "error": -1
  }
}
DEBUG: Package not scheduled (branch="renovate/rust-1.x")

Note that it did work for some of my repos, like clap-rs/clap#5059. Confusingly, that was listed as "requested' (instead of monthly) and I never did a request. As for the log

DEBUG: Checking schedule "before 3am on the first day of the month" (branch="renovate/rust-1.x")
{
  "parsedSchedule": {
    "schedules": [
      {
        "t_b": [
          10800
        ],
        "D": [
          1
        ]
      }
    ],
    "exceptions": [],
    "error": -1
  }
}

DEBUG: Matches schedule before 3am on the first day of the month (branch="renovate/rust-1.x")

[HonkingGoose]

I see you're using the Mend Renovate app. Is there a reason you're limiting Renovate's schedule to just three hours a month? ¹

  schedule: [
    'before 3am on the first day of the month',
  ],

We have a warning about this in our docs: ²

Time/schedule based limitations

When a user configures a schedule in their repo config, they may think that this schedule "controls" when Renovate runs.
In actuality, Renovate may be running frequently, but skipping updates to the repo if the configured schedule is not met.
Additionally, the Renovate admin may have put the bot on its own schedule, or the job queue may be too long, so Renovate doesn't even get a chance to run on your repository during a certain scheduled time window.

For scheduled action to take place, both these need to happen:

• The bot needs to run against your repository
• The current time needs to fall within your repository's configured schedule

The Mend Renovate app and scheduled jobs

The Mend Renovate App checks each active repository roughly every three hours, if no activity has been seen before then (merged PRs, etc).

For this reason, you should set your schedule window to at least three or four hours.
This makes it likely that Renovate bot checks your repository at least once during the schedule.

So maybe the problem will be fixed by giving Renovate more hours in the schedule?

Footnotes

1. crate-ci/clap-cargo Renovate config file ↩

2. Renovate docs, Known limitations ↩

[epage]

Thanks for getting back to me!

That seems like a string I would have copy/pasted. Unsure if the schedule:monthly preset was originally constructed that way or I found it somewhere else on RenovateBot's website. I tend to avoid presents because I find they have a lot of behavior that is non-obvious and feel like they are hard to find when I have questions.

btw even the text you quoted makes it sound like that schedule would work :)

The Mend Renovate App checks each active repository roughly every three hours, if no activity has been seen before then (merged PRs, etc).

The weird thing is I thought I was comparing logs for when the schedule worked and didn't work and yet I couldn't see a difference in them

I'll go ahead and update to 5am to give myself even more of a buffer

[HonkingGoose]

Response to comment

That seems like a string I would have copy/pasted. Unsure if the schedule:monthly preset was originally constructed that way or I found it somewhere else on RenovateBot's website.

You probably copy/pasted that from our docs, back when it was 3 hours. We recently bumped the schedule to four hours to make sure it falls within the Mend Renovate app timeframe. So it was a correct config then. 😉

I tend to avoid presents because I find they have a lot of behavior that is non-obvious and feel like they are hard to find when I have questions.

Yeah, I was about to ask why you don't extend from config:recommended or config:best-practices. You're basically writing your whole config from scratch.

You're the second person today that's confused by our presets. I'll discuss this with the maintainers to see if we have any good ways to make it easier to see what each preset does.

The Mend Renovate app also has some extra hard-coded behaviors, I think. Those are not in the docs anyway...

btw even the text you quoted makes it sound like that schedule would work :)

Note it says roughly three hours, I don't think we meant to "guarantee" it runs every three hours on the dot. 😉

I'll go ahead and update to 5am to give myself even more of a buffer

Sounds good to me!

Other possible cause of the problem?

I think @rarkins mentioned that the Mend Renovate app ignores "stale" repositories. But I don't know the specifics of that behavior. It could be that the repository was too stale, and Renovate was waiting for some human activity before running again???

[epage]

I think @rarkins mentioned that the Mend Renovate app ignores "stale" repositories. But I don't know the specifics of that behavior. It could be that the repository was too stale, and Renovate was waiting for some human activity before running again???

I've had problems with that in the past with Github Actions where I have passively maintained projects and they unschedule my scheduled workflow that was meant to verify my project worked with newer versions of the Rust compiler and the latest versions of my dependencies.

The example repo I used here had a PR merged by me in May and I rejected a RenovateBot update in June.