Performing per-environment staged rollouts of dependency updates with Renovate

🤖 This post includes some LLM-derived content 🤖 In a lot of organisations, you'll find a fairly consistent structure in teams' (GitOps) repositories, where they set up a branch per deployable environment, such as: * dev * staging * prod Within this structure, the approach for releasing upgrades would be to stage/promote upgrades through environments, starting with dev, through staging and up to prod. If you're using Renovate - which I have been recommending long before it became my job - you can handle this same workflow very nicely. Today, I learned a new couple of tricks to make this work even nicer from Renovate maintainer Michael Kriese, who's been working on this setup upstream with the Forgejo maintainers, where it's been working very well for the team. Prerequisites As a starting point, you would want to set up your repository with baseBranchPatterns to make Renovate manage each of the branches you use, i.e. { "$schema": "https://docs.renovatebot.com/renovate-schema.json",…