ADR-005 - Dependency Maintenance

Creation Date	Status	Author
19/12/2025	Accepted	@mclargo

Context and Problem Statement

Current situation is that project is not often updated. And when we want to run it, sometimes we find out that some dependencies are not in the last version. Usually, nothing is critical/or broken, but it's annoying and time-consuming to update dependencies manually.

Solution

We want to use a tool that automatically review my dependencies and creates pull requests in my github repository to update dependencies in the project. List of requirements for the tool:

• It should support poetry, github actions and pre-commit hooks.
• It should be free for open source projects.
• It should be easy to configure and maintain.

I explored Renovate Bot and it seems to fit our needs as it supports all the requirements above described. I installed github app and created configuration file inside my repository. Renovate Bot was automatically reviewing dependencies and PRs started to appear with the updated dependencies.

I tuned configuration a bit to avoid too many PRs and to group some dependencies together (except python and pre-commit hooks, which I want to update separately).

Still in alpha stage of usage, but so far it looks promising and I hope it will save me some time in the future.

You can find Renovate in the Github Apps of your repository settings. Configuration file is renovate.json and more details about configuration and jobs is available in Mend website.

Other Solutions Considered

I used Dependabot in other project, but it didn't support pre-commit. But I do remember that it was quite easy to use too, and requires minimal configuration.