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---
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title: Updating and Rebasing branches
description: How Renovate Updates and Rebases branches
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---
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# Updating and rebasing branches
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There are many situations in which Renovate must update/rebase a branch.
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Here is a list of the most common cases where Renovate must update/rebase the branch:
- When a pull request has conflicts due to changes on the base branch
- When you have enabled "Require branches to be up to date before merging" on GitHub
- When you have manually told Renovate to rebase when behind the base branch with `"rebaseWhen": "behind-base-branch"`
- When a newer version of the dependency is released
- When you request a manual rebase from the Renovate bot
- When you use `"automerge": true` and `"rebaseWhen": "auto"` on a branch / pr
Renovate uses its own version of "rebasing", which is _not the same_ as doing a `git rebase` with Git.
Instead, Renovate reapplies all updates into a new commit based off of the head of the base branch.
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## No rebasing if you have made edits
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First of all, here is the one time when Renovate _won't_ update branches.
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If you edit a Renovate branch directly (e.g. to make a code fix to allow tests to pass again) then Renovate stops all updates of that branch.
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It is up to you to either finish the job and merge the PR, or rename it and close it so that Renovate can take back over again.
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## Rebasing conflicted PRs
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If new commits to the base branch - such as merging another Renovate PR - result in an open Renovate PR having merge conflicts, then Renovate will recreate ("rebase") any conflicted PRs.
This applies both to commits to dependency files such as `package.json` as well as lock files such as `yarn.lock` .
You should not ever need to resolve such conflicts manually.
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You can disable this functionality by configuring `"rebaseWhen": "never"` (not recommended).
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## Rebasing out-of-date branches
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There are multiple cases where Renovate will rebase its branches off the base branch every time they are out of date:
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1. If you configure `"rebaseWhen": "behind-base-branch"`
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1. If you use the default configuration `"rebaseWhen": "auto"` and the repository has a requirement that branches must be up-to-date before merging (e.g. "Require branches to be up to date before merging" on GitHub, or fast-forward-only settings on Bitbucket Server or GitLab)
1. If you use the default configuration `"rebaseWhen" : "auto"` and configure `"automerge" : true`
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In that case Renovate PRs will be rebased off the repository's base branch whenever they are behind the base branch, even if the PRs are not conflicted.
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## Newer dependency versions
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If an existing PR is open to upgrade dependency "foo" to v1.1.0 and then v1.1.1 is released, then Renovate will regenerate the branch again.
This way:
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- Each Renovate branch will always have 1 and only 1 commit
- The newest version will be based off the latest base branch commit at the time
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## Manual rebasing
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You can request that Renovate rebase a PR by ticking the rebase/retry checkbox on GitHub or GitLab.
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Or you can add a "rebase" label to the PR.
The label name is configurable via the `rebaseLabel` option.
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If you apply a rebase label then Renovate will regenerate its commit for the branch, even if the branch has been modified.
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Therefore it is useful in situations such as:
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- If a branch is stale but you don't have `rebaseWhen=behind-base-branch` enabled
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- If a branch has been edited and you want to discard the edits and have Renovate create it again
- If a branch was created with an error (e.g. lockfile generation) and you want Renovate to try again
