Onboarding PRs will autoclose after 366 days of being unaccepted (on Mend-hosted Renovate) (TTL: 2 weeks)

[jamietanna]

As part of continued work to make Mend's hosted Renovate (Mend Developer Platform) offering scale to our user base, we have noticed several thousand repositories in the onboarding state.

When in the onboarding state, Renovate keeps the onboarding PRs updated as it runs, which performs the extract and lookup phases (generally the most expensive processing time of a repository run).

Looking at the data behind usage on the platform, we've found that - of the repositories in the onboarding state, an overwhelming percentage of these have been in onboarding for a significant period of time - ~62% of these have been open since 2023, and ~80% open since before the start of 2025.

As a means to reduce unnecessary processing of repositories who very likely aren't looking to onboard to Renovate - otherwise they would have likely accepted the onboarding PR - we are planning on automagically closing PRs.

This will be implemented at some point in December.

What's changing?

TL;DR:

• CLI users: unaffected, as the feature will be opt-in and not changed by default
• Mend-hosted users:
  • PRs that were created > 366 days ago will be closed
  • The renovate/configure branch will be deleted
  • The PR will not have the title renamed
  • The PR will receive a comment indicating why it has been autoclosed

This will be implemented under the feature #39206 which then will be enabled by default on the Mend Developer Platform.

How will I know if I'm affected?

If you have an onboarding Pull Request from a Mend hosted app, which was raised > 366 days ago.

These are most likely repositories that are not looking to onboard to Renovate, given the age of the unaccepted PR.

How can I get an onboarding PR created, after this change?

If a repository has a PR closed, and you decide you do want to re-onboard to Renovate, you can follow the steps that Renovate highlights when an onboarding PR is closed:

To enable Renovate, you can either (a) change this PR's title to get a new onboarding PR, and merge the new onboarding PR, or (b) create a Renovate config file, and commit that file to your base branch.

What's the timeline?

We are planning on implementing this change on the Mend Developer Platform at some point in December.

We are not being more clear given the likelihood that engaged users of Renovate in repositories likely means if you're reading this, you'd be unaffected.

If you do have any concerns, please let us know!

This announcement has a feedback Time-To-Live (TTL) of 2 weeks (ending 2025-11-26).

How will this be communicated?

We are not looking to share this announcement out more widely, given the likelihood that engaged users of Renovate in repositories likely would have already accepted onboarding PRs.

• GitHub Discussion
• Social Media
• prHeader / dependencyDashboardHeader
• Announcement bar on the Renovate docs site

FAQs

What happens if I'm using requireConfig=optional?

If your org- or repo-level config has “Require config file” turned off (requireConfig=optional), repositories that have not accepted an onboarding PR may start to see automated PRs from Renovate.

If that happens, and is unwanted, toggle “Require config file” to on (requireConfig=required) at the repository level.

(Will be added as they're asked)

[jamietanna]

As an update, this is planning to be updated this week

At a later date, it'll be possible to configure a lower value using Inherited Config

[jamietanna]

As an additional update, we're planning to roll this out on 2026-01-26