My current company has settled on using Gradle. It doesn’t make me very happy, but you need to learn to work with constraints. Plus, I must admit that the developers who actually implemented the build files did a pretty good job overall: they used Kotlin instead of Groovy, they moved code to regular plugins, etc. This week, I worked on improvements to a new project and set up Renovate.

I’ve been a big fan of Renovate for a couple of years already. Renovate scans your repositories, detects outdated package versions, and opens pull requests to automatically bump them. It’s similar to Dependabot in that it keeps your dependencies up to date. If I had to compare them in one sentence, I’d say Renovate is less integrated in the GitHub ecosystem, but handles more ecosystems and, more importantly, is extensible.

In my earlier post about moving from Kotlin Scripting to Python, I mentioned several reasons: Separating the content from the scriptKotlin Scripting is an unloved child of JetBrainsRenovate cannot update Kotlin Scripting files I was wrong on the third point. Here’s my mea culpa. First things first, Renovate does indeed manages Kotlin Scripting files - since 2022. Even better, Renovate can manage any type of file.