Renovate: Support sbt / scala

[gaeljw]

What would you like Renovate to be able to do?

I would love if RenovateBot could work on SBT Scala builds (https://www.scala-sbt.org/) and renovate the build.sbt file of a project.

Describe the solution you'd like

As for Maven, dependencies can be found on Maven central repository.
What changes from Maven is the way dependencies are declared which is not a declarative XML file but is plain Scala code.

Some sbt plugins already exist to upgrade dependencies. I didn't test them but maybe they could be reused or used a codebase:

• https://github.com/rtimush/sbt-updates
• https://github.com/aiyanbo/sbt-dependency-updates

Scenario

Given a build.sbt file with this content:

 // Scala dependency
libraryDependencies += "com.typesafe.play" %% "play-ws" % "2.6.10"
// Java dependency with test scope
libraryDependencies += "org.mockito" % "mockito-all" % "1.10.18" % Test

When I run RenovateBot
Then I would like to have a merge request with this content:

// Scala dependency
libraryDependencies += "com.typesafe.play" %% "play-ws" % "2.7.0" 
// Java dependency with test scope
libraryDependencies += "org.mockito" % "mockito-all" % "1.10.19" % Test 

Possible difficulties

The only thing to take care of is the fact that dependencies can be declared in multiple ways in the build.sbt file as it is itself a Scala file.

For instance, following content could be possible:

val myDependencyVersion: String = "2.6.10"
val myDependency: ModuleID = "com.typesafe.play" %% "play-json" % myDependencyVersion

libraryDependencies += myDependency

Describe alternatives you've considered

N/A

Additional context

N/A

[rarkins]

Sounds good! I think we can start with the most obvious format first and add others on demand. Is libraryDependencies a reserved term or can that vary per-project too?

[gaeljw]

Indeed, libraryDependencies is a reserved term.

I agree we can start with the most common format.
But please note that the following format is pretty common too (multiple dependencies declared at the same time):

libraryDependencies ++= Seq(
  groupID % artifactID % revision,
  groupID % otherID % otherRevision
)

Sbt documentation: https://www.scala-sbt.org/1.x/docs/Library-Dependencies.html (managed dependencies section).

I have no idea at all about how RenovateBot works.
If it uses some text parsing, maybe looking at the groupID % artifactID % revision or groupID %% artifactID % revision (notice the double %%) patterns is a good start.
Although more advanced declarations will be tricky to work with if just using parsing IMHO.

Would be glad to help if I can in any way ;)

[rarkins]

@gaeljw thanks very much for this info. Do you think you could try filling out as much of this readme as possible for sbt/scala? You can submit it as a PR into lib/manager/sbt/readme.md. Even if it's still a WIP, we can use it as the basis for implementation. Please also check out other lib/manager/*/readme.md examples too, e.g. buildkite, bundler or cargo.

[gaeljw]

@rarkins Just initiated a PR for the README (https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate/pull/3458).

Answering all the questions of the README make me say it won't be as easy as I could think in the first place.. lot of cases to cover. I'm not even sure I know all ways sbt can be used. But I described what I know, which is I hope the most common ways sbt is used.

[psttf]

Maybe it will be helpful to take a look at the approach used in aiyanbo/sbt-dependency-updates. It has the dependencyUpgrade task that actually upgrades project's dependencies. But it requires dependencies to be specified in a more strict format within a special project/Dependencies.scala file which is then referenced in the main build.sbt. The need to move dependencies to a separate file is a fairly low price for the ability to update them automatically.

[psttf]

Another example is https://github.com/fthomas/scala-steward

[gaeljw]

Scala-Steward looks interesting, maybe we could look at how they work and even discuss with them as this could be part of Renovate :thinking:

[rarkins]

Updated status:

• [x] "sbt" manager readme is merged into master (thanks @gaeljw)
• [x] "ivy" versioning merged into master (thanks @zharinov)

Todo:

• [ ] extract + update functions for sbt

[renovate-bot]

:tada: This issue has been resolved in version 16.9.0 :tada:

The release is available on:

• npm package (@latest dist-tag)
• GitHub release

Your semantic-release bot :package::rocket: