New image with node v16 (LTS)

[kalimerre]

Hello,

Node v16 had been released in the LTS mode (https://nodejs.org/en/blog/release/v16.13.0/). It also bundle npm v8.X in it which offers a package-lock v2.

Do you know when Renovate will offer new images with that new LTS version and therefore the new npm version ?
I assume it'll be in a new major version of Renovate to not break existing projects on the current version right ?

Thanks !

[rarkins]

At the moment it's looking like weeks to months before we default the pre-built Renovate images to use Node 16. In the meantime you'd need to build your own custom image. e.g. https://github.com/renovatebot/docker-renovate-full/blob/main/Dockerfile

[viceice]

this is blocked by:

• Test/validate node 16 for Renovate runtime renovate#12177
• ci: add node v16 tests renovate#12244

[Shegox]

As I just found this out today, there is a new self-hosted option "binarySource": "install", which dynamically installs the npm version depending on the engine field in the package.json without using a sidecar container and allows to use lockFileVersion1 and lockFileVersion2 for different repositories.

[rarkins]

@Shegox yes, you're right. We'd be happy to hear feedback about whether it works flawlessly for you, because we plan to make it the default option for our images once we're confident we found and fixed any bugs or important edge cases

[Shegox]

@rarkins I just enabled it, but if any problems do come up I will make sure to open a proper bug report. From the first runs it looks like a really cool and good working feature! Thanks a lot for your and everyones awesome work on renovate!

[Ugoku]

this is blocked by:

• Test/validate node 16 for Renovate runtime renovate#12177
• ci: add node v16 tests renovate#12244

It seems there is nothing blocking this anymore. Any status update?

[scinos]

FWIW, renovate 32.72-slim has node 16:

$ docker run --rm -ti --entrypoint /bin/bash renovate/renovate:32.72-slim -c 'node --version'
v16.15.1

[rarkins]

Let's do a major release of Renovate next week so we can coincide this to be more polite to those who might be surprised that the node version changes in the full image

[dmosen]

@rarkins We are also affected by this issue. As we are using OpenShift and we are having some trouble getting binarySource=install or binarySource=docker to work, a renovate full image with preinstalled node 16 would be helpful for us.

[scinos]

Is there something I can do to help this happening?

I see there is a pending Node 16 update in the Dependency Dashboard, but I can't click on it to force a PR creation.

[viceice]

Nope, still blocked by missing renovate feature

[scinos]

I'm trying to understand the issue to see how can I help:

Looks like the "missing renovate feature" you mentioned comes from renovatebot/renovate#12177, right? But looking at the issue screenshot, that seems to be a problem with the Renovate publish flow itself, not that renovate won't work on a Node 16 environment. Is that correct?

Given the slim docker tag already has Node 16, I'd assume Renovate itself would work just fine. If so, would it be possible to release a new version of the Docker image with the current Renovate version? That way we don't need to wait to fix Renovate publish workflow, right?

[viceice]

no, it's because we break a lot existing users who need an older npm version.

so we wait for dynamic node install to support that. after we'll update node on this image.

[dmosen]

We finally got binarySource=install working in our OpenShift installation:

To fix this problem we needed to add BUILDPACK=1 explicitly to the container's environment variables. (We did so by adding the variable to the kubernetes manifest.)

Explanation

If you use Renovate on OpenShift the Renovate process is started by a dynamically generated user using /bin/sh instead of /bin/bash. In this case the environment variable BUILDPACK is not being set. This results in Renovate refusing to apply binarySource=install. If this is the case the Renovate logs contain the following entry:
binarySource=install is only compatible with images derived from containerbase/buildpack

[rarkins]

Thanks for the info. Would this be something we could fix automatically if /bin/sh wraps /bin/bash?

[dmosen]

I think this should work. Starting /bin/bash inside /bin/sh also worked for us.

[viceice]

Can we simply add a small bash script as /bin/sh ?

#!/bin/bash

if [[ -f "$BASH_ENV" && -z "${BUILDPACK+x}" ]]; then
  . $BASH_ENV
fi

exec dumb-init -- "$@"

This will help to autoload our env in any case. So also jenkins pipelines work, as they use docker exec to execute commands.

Can someone evaluate if this works and then open an issue on https://github.com/containerbase/buildpack to autocreate this on install-buildpack

[scinos]

binarySource=install won't affect which Node version is used, only which npm version, right?

[viceice]

yes, we will enable install mode soon

[viceice]

will be done tomorrow