renovate-mcp

An MCP server for designing Renovate configurations interactively. Point it at a local repo and let an LLM help you read, validate, preview, and save renovate.json.

Quick start

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tibuntu/renovate-mcp/main/install.sh | bash

Or add this entry manually to your client's mcpServers config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "renovate": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "renovate-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Restart your client and try the prompt: "List the namespaces available under renovate://presets." A response listing config, docker, npm, … confirms the server is reachable. Long-form install options are under Install below.

What you can do

• Read and explain configs — locate the active renovate.json*, expand every extends preset offline, and trace which preset set each field.
• Discover presets from intent — describe what you want ("automerge patches, group dev deps") and get ranked built-in (and your own local-repo) presets, plus a draft config skeleton when nothing fits.
• Preview custom managers before running Renovate — regex and JSONata, with file/line hits and extracted dep info.
• Validate and lint — schema validation plus a semantic lint pass for Renovate-specific footguns (unwrapped regexes, unknown manager names, deprecated keys).
• Dry-run against a local checkout or a remote GitHub/GitLab — see exactly which PRs Renovate would open.
• Save back atomically — round-trip writes preserve comments and key order in existing JSON-with-comments files.

Tools & resources

Sixteen tools and three resource templates. Each tool name below links to its full reference in docs/tools.md.

Tool	Purpose
check_setup	Report Renovate CLI + validator availability, versions, install hints, and a platformContext block for env diagnosis. Also runs at startup. Pass an optional repoPath to add a repoContext block diagnosing the repo's git origin, config endpoint/platform, endpoint reachability, and token coverage.
get_version	Report the renovate-mcp server version and whether it's a released or local/dev build.
read_config	Locate and parse a repo's Renovate config in Renovate's own discovery order.
suggest_presets	Search built-in (and optional local-repo) presets by natural-language intent; ranks matches and sketches an unvalidated draft config skeleton for multi-facet or weakly-covered intents. Offline.
resolve_config	Expand every extends preset offline. Opt in to fetching github> / gitlab> presets over HTTPS.
explain_config	Inverse of resolve_config: annotate every leaf field with the chain of presets that set it.
resolve_config_diff	Offline structural diff of two fully-resolved configs — changed fields plus an order-insensitive set diff of array keys (packageRules, customManagers, …). The refactor-friendly counterpart to dry_run_diff.
test_package_rules	Offline what-if: which packageRules match a hypothetical dependency, which matcher decided each, and what each contributes. Faithful (Renovate's real matchers in a worker); fields you don't supply are reported as unevaluatabl