Output dashboard contents to file in dry-run

[thompson-tomo]

Tell us more.

I would like a quick way to experiment with renovate config locally using the cli tool to see if the config changes i am making would have the desired effect and ideally being able to surface this information in the PR to change the config.

Looking at what is currently available with the cli tool, it appears that the debug logs when run in locally provide most of the information needed, however the output is very verbose and not easy to use (see attachment - updates.json)

What would help is if doing a dry-run, a file is generated in the current directory by default names updates.md which contains the sections of the dashboard issue which lists the updates and their status, so that we can see what the result on the repo would be, In addition adding a dashboard.md which contains the entire content would also be useful so that we can test that changes we are making to header/footer etc work.

[jamietanna]

the output is very verbose and not easy to use

I will say that the packageFiles with updates output is very useful and important to get used to being able to work with - i.e. #24823 / https://github.com/secustor/backstage-plugins / https://www.jvt.me/posts/2025/05/30/renovate-dependency-dashboardless/ have ways of building on top of that to display very similar data

I think outputting what the Dependency Dashboard looks like into the TRACE logs would be OK - then logLevelRemap can be used to move it to the log level you'd prefer, and then parse it out of the logs (when using LOG_FORMAT=json)