GitHub and GitHub Enterprise Server

Authentication

First, create a classic Personal Access Token for the bot account, select repo scope. Fine-grained Personal Access Tokens do not support the GitHub GraphQL API and cannot be used with Renovate.

Let Renovate use your PAT by doing one of the following:

• Set your PAT as a token in your config.js file
• Set your PAT as an environment variable RENOVATE_TOKEN
• Set your PAT when you run Renovate in the CLI with --token=

Remember to set platform=github somewhere in your Renovate config file.

If you use GitHub Enterprise Server then endpoint must point to https://github.enterprise.com/api/v3/. You can choose where you want to set endpoint:

• In your config.js file
• In a environment variable
• In a CLI parameter

Running as a GitHub App

Instead of a bot account with a Personal Access Token you can run renovate as a self-hosted GitHub App.

When creating the GitHub App give it the following permissions:

Permission	Scope
Checks	read + write
Commit statuses	read + write
Contents	read + write
Issues	read + write
Pull requests	read + write
Workflows	read + write
Dependabot alerts	read
Members	read
Metadata	read

Other values like Homepage URL, User authorization callback URL and webhooks can be disabled or filled with dummy values.

Inside your config.js you need to set the following values, assuming the name of your app is self-hosted-renovate:

username:"self-hosted-renovate[bot]"

The slug name of your app with [bot] appended

gitAuthor:"Self-hosted Renovate Bot <123456+self-hosted-renovate[bot]@users.noreply.github.enterprise.com>"

The GitHub App associated email to match commits to the bot. It needs to have the user id and the username followed by the users.noreply.-domain of either github.com or the GitHub Enterprise Server. A way to get the user id of a GitHub app is to query the user API at api.github.com/users/self-hosted-renovate[bot] (github.com) or github.enterprise.com/api/v3/users/self-hosted-renovate[bot] (GitHub Enterprise Server).

token:"ghs_123exampletoken"

You must use a GitHub App Installation token.

Previously, the token had to be prefixed with x-access-token:. We recommend you replace any prefixed tokens with normal tokens. We will drop support for prefixed tokens in the future.

Any tokens that do not start with ghs_ (for example tokens from GitHub Enterprise Server versions before version 3.2) must be prefixed with x-access-token:.

Note

The installation tokens expire after 1 hour and need to be regenerated regularly. Alternatively as environment variable RENOVATE_TOKEN, or via CLI --token=.

repositories: ["orgname/repo-1","orgname/repo-2"]

List of repositories to run on. Alternatively as comma-separated environment variable RENOVATE_REPOSITORIES. The GitHub App installation token is scoped at most to a single organization and running on multiple organizations requires multiple invocations of renovate with different token and repositories parameters.

Features awaiting implementation

• The automergeStrategy configuration option has not been implemented for this platform, and all values behave as if the value auto was used. Renovate will use the merge strategy configured in the GitHub repository itself, and this cannot be overridden yet