Using PR comments as commands

[rarkins]

It's often been asked if we can support comments as commands, like some other bots/tools do, including some automerging ones. For example @renovate rebase, although I think we have a better solution for that (the checkbox). Another related request/idea here: #15202 (comment)

There's a few challenges for this:

• We want this to work in CLI and not just in the hosted app
• Working in the CLI would mean checking every comment of every PR on every run
• We need to distinguish between old comments already acted upon, versus new ones we need to act upon
• We need to determine if the person making the comment is authorized to influence the bot (might require additional permissions)
• In the case of the app, @renovate do something would actually notify github.com/renovate (which we don't control) rather than the app which is github.com/apps/renovate. So we might want to avoid @ altogether and instead do something like #renovate or even just #rebase

[rarkins]

It would be quite a different feature, please create a new discussion (not issue) to discuss

[nachtien]

I'd love this. Another cool feature would be if you could leave a comment and change the version it was going to update to. I ran into an issue today where we couldn't update to the latest and greatest, but a version lower.

[ericcornelissen]

I'd love to see a renovate ignore this minor version functionality (just like dependabot) to manage selected updates without having to update the configuration file.

[jamietanna]

That functionality is possible by closing the PR - Renovate will detect it as such

[ericcornelissen]

In my experience closing the PR ignores the specific version the upgrade was for, not the whole minor version range. It might be worth nothing that I deal exclusively with pinned dependencies.

If the behavior is as you described, I believe it would still be valuable to have the option to ignore only the specific version or ignore an entire major version (as in renovate ignore this major version).