prTitle is null when running templated postUpgradeTasks

[dipunm]

What would you like help with?

I think I found a bug

How are you running Renovate?

Self-hosted

If you're self-hosting Renovate, tell us which platform (GitHub, GitLab, etc) and which version of Renovate.

GitHub + Renovate 38.55.3

Please tell us more about your question or problem

I have a pull request in our private repository that is supposed to take the pull request title and feed it to a post update script:

'pnpm renovate-post-upgrade \'{{{packageFile}}}\' \'{{{prTitle}}}\' \'{{{replace \'@\' \'_at_\' depNameSanitized}}}\'',

Recently. and I'm not exactly sure when, but it would have been on or after August 8th, prTitle was being passed as empty.

With some local debugging, I was able to find that the value of prTitle is null but I don't know why this is the case considering that the documentation implies that it should inherity commitMessage.

https://docs.renovatebot.com/configuration-options/#prtitle

Logs (if relevant)

Logs

Replace this text with your logs, between the starting and ending triple backticks

[rarkins]

Do you mean to say that this is something which used to work but then stopped working? If it used to work, please identify the last working version.

[dipunm]

Okay, will need to do some bisecting.

[dipunm]

After some bisecting, I believe the issue came from a commit that updated from:

37.440.7 -> 38.9.5

[dipunm]

Changing this to use {{{messageCommit}}} now produces the value:

{{{commitMessagePrefix}}} {{{commitMessageAction}}} {{{commitMessageTopic}}} {{{commitMessageExtra}}} {{{commitMessageSuffix}}}

rather than the expanded result.

[github-actions[bot]]

Hi there,

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[dipunm]

Here is what I could create, I tested our renovate implementation against it with modifications to prove that it could reproduce the issue. There are two issues I observed which are now reflected in this POC:

1. prTitle is empty
2. commitMessage is does not have its variables expanded.

More details in the readme.

https://github.com/dipunm/renovate-bug-demo

[rarkins]

The commitMessage and prTitle fields belong to the branch object and not upgrade object. You are running these tasks with executionMode=update which means they use the upgrade's config and not branch. The prTitle/commitMessage could be wrong even if the upgrade's ones were compiled

[dipunm]

This is still a change in behaviour. Maybe if I describe my use case, we can figure out what the workaround is:

1. We use changesets to manage releases in our monorepo
2. We also use pinned versions for all of our dependencies as with an automated pipeline we can turn out packages quickly.
3. Whenever there is a runtime update to a package, we need Renovate to add a new changeset so that it triggers a release.
4. We require the following information to create a changeset file:
   1. packageFile - Used to find and parse the package.json file so we can name the package that needs to be version bumped (works)
   2. prTitle - or something that describes the change to go into the release notes (broken)
   3. the name of the dependency/branch to help create a unique but still identifiable name (works)

What we have right now is this:

pnpm renovate-post-upgrade '{{{packageFile}}}' '{{{prTitle}}}' '{{{replace '@' '_at_' depNameSanitized}}}'

I suspect that if we change this to branch then the packageFile variable could become incorrect. What happens if a branch includes updates across different packages in a monorepo?

This used to work previously, so what variables should I have been using in this scenario?
Also, where can I find a list of fields that are available on the update object vs on the branch one?

[rarkins]

Two approaches are possible:

1. Instead of prTitle you instead have a more complicated template of its content, such as Update {{depName}} to v{{newVersion}}
2. See if there's a way to partially revert the changes from https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate/pull/29955/files#diff-a735555bc1758d8b93380ff92f55a928d2c19d4bb4804c1072e9b2e1b3e5c534 without breaking things

[dipunm]

Hey, thanks for your help. We were able to use option 1 and this has resolved our issue. Thanks!