Automatically Update the Hidden Dependencies in Your DevContainer
- David
- Docker , Dev container , Renovate , Dependency management
- March 11, 2025
- Reading time: 1 minutes
Table of Contents
Renovate is able to update the DevContainer feature versions,
but it is not able to update the hidden dependencies in the .devcontainer/devcontainer.json file, like for example the
node and npm versions in this example:
"features": {
"myociregistry.local/devcontainer/features/node:1.1.0": {
"version": "18.20.5",
"npmVersion": "10.5.0"
}
},
To update these dependencies, you can use define a customManagers in the Renovate configuration file:
"customManagers": [
{
"customType": "regex",
"description": "Update version fields in devcontainer.json",
"fileMatch": ["(^|/)devcontainer\\.json$"],
"matchStrings": [
"// renovate: datasource=(?<datasource>[a-z-]+?)(?: depName=(?<depName>.+?))?
packageName=(?<packageName>.+?)\\s+\"\\w*[Vv]ersion\":\\s*\"(?<currentValue>[^\"]+)\""
]
}
],
To make this work we need to add a comment to the devcontainer.json file with the following format:
"features": {
"myociregistry.local/devcontainer/features/node:1.1.0": {
// renovate: datasource=node depName=node packageName=node
"version": "18.20.5",
// renovate: datasource=npm depName=npm packageName=npm
"npmVersion": "10.5.0"
}
},
With that in place, Renovate will be able to update the node and npm versions in the devcontainer.json file.