Enable renovatebot for the project

[janhoy]

This PR adds automatic dependency housekeeping to the project through Renovatebot, which is an alternative to dependabot. See slack discussion here.

So once this is merged, a self-hosted bot called SolrBot, will kick off every Sunday and file PRs for dependencies that need upgrades. Here is an example of such a PR from my sandbox test project. A nice feature is that the PR will also include changes from gradlew updateLicenses and --write-locks, so for a majority of upgrades, there's nothing left to do for the committer.

We can't use Dependabot since it does not support our gradle "consistent-versions" plugin. We can't use the public Renovatebot github app since it cannot be configured to run custom post-commands like gradlew updateLicenses. So we follow GitHub's advice of creating a custom github account for the bot, and that user will run renovatebot in a GitHub Action, and fork the solr repo and file PRs against the Solr repo. This has the nice property that the bot won't need commit-rights to the solr-repo, which would be disallowed by ASF policy.

I plan to share the github credentials for the SolrBot account with the PMC if I can find a secure way of doing it. I remember there is a private svn repo per PMC, but could not find it.

[janhoy]

Here are some comments on the suggested config. The reference guide for how to configure the bot is here https://docs.renovatebot.com

[janhoy]

I can file an INFRA ticket to create a private solr-pmc git repo, PMC only, where we can share secrets

We now got a private repo solr-private, and Infra suggests storing encrypted secrets there. However, the PMC is considering other/better approaches for secrets management, so this is subject to change.

I'll invite a number of you to the https://github.com/solrbot/renovate-github-action repo so you can commit directly.

[chatman]

I changed teh commit email to SolrBot [email protected], see renovate config.

Who controls that email address?

Regarding the email of the github account for the bot, I'd like to switch that to e.g. [email protected].

Oh god! Of all the bad ideas in the world, why am I seeing several of the worst ones here in this single issue?

IMO, this separate GH account (solrbot) is outside the purview of Apache Solr project, and is a 3rd party project. We shouldn't need the private@ or PMC level involvement for this project. If you disagree, let us discuss in the private@ list about it.

[janhoy]

IMO, this separate GH account (solrbot) is outside the purview of Apache Solr project, and is a 3rd party project. We shouldn't need the private@ or PMC level involvement for this project. If you disagree, let us discuss in the private@ list about it.

After conclusion from private@ list discussion, we don't need this bot / github action to be under official control of the Solr PMC. So I'll re-brand this project as being a 3rd party community project, both in this PR and over in the solrbot account.

That means I'm reverting back to [email protected] as the commit email address.

[epugh]

Really nice docs, as usual @janhoy ! I am very much looking forward to this experiment on reducing upgrade workload... If it works, I'm going to start doing this on other opensource projects that I steward....

[janhoy]

Turns out the bot account needs "triage" rights on the repo in order to set the "dependencies" label on PRs. ASF.yaml provides a way to grant that.

However, since we currently don't use labels at all for our PRs, I'll instead skip the labels config. We can always filter by Author. We can introduce labels later.

[janhoy]

Thanks for weighing in, now let's see the first PRs flowing in :)

[HoustonPutman]

This is awesome Jan, thanks for the work and great documentation!!

[HoustonPutman]

This is great, and a step that's missing in the dependabot feature for the solr-operator.