renovate/lib/versioning/regex

Regular Expression Versioning is designed to be like a flexible fallback versioning approach is Renovate's other versioning schemes don't do the job.

The regex scheme makes use of Regular Express capture groups. The valid capture groups for regex versioning are:

• major, minor, and patch: at least one of these must be provided. When determining whether a package has updated, these values will be compared in the standard semantic versioning fashion. If any of these fields are omitted, they will be treated as if they were 0 -- in this way, you can describe versioning schemes with up to three incrementing values.
• prerelease: this value, if captured, will mark a given release as a prerelease (eg. unstable). If this value is captured and you have configured "ignoreUnstable": true, the given release will be skipped.
• compatibility: this value defines the "build compatibility" of a given dependency. A proposed Renovate update will never change the specified compatibility value. For example, if you are pinning to 1.2.3-linux (and linux is captured as the compatibility value), Renovate will not update you to 1.2.4-osx.

The compatibility concept was originally introduced for Docker versioning but sometimes package authors may use/misuse suffixes to mean compatibility in other versioning schemes.

Here is an example of using regex versioning to correct behavior of the guava Maven package, which misuses suffixes as compatibility indicators:

{
  "packageRules": [
    {
      "matchPackageNames": ["com.google.guava:guava"],
      "versioning": "regex:^(?<major>\\d+)(\\.(?<minor>\\d+))?(\\.(?<patch>\\d+))?(-(?<compatibility>.*))?$"
    }
  ]
}

Here is another example, this time for handling python Docker images, which use both pre-release indicators as well as version suffixes for compatibility:

{
  "packageRules": [
    {
      "matchDatasources": ["docker"],
      "matchPackageNames": ["python"],
      "versioning": "regex:^(?<major>\\d+)\\.(?<minor>\\d+)\\.(?<patch>\\d+)(?<prerelease>[^.-]+)?(-(?<compatibility>.*))?$"
    }
  ]
}

Here is another example, this time for handling Bitnami Docker images, which use build indicators as well as version suffixes for compatibility:

{
  "packageRules": [
    {
      "matchDatasources": ["docker"],
      "matchPackagePrefixes": ["bitnami/"],
      "versioning": "regex:^(?<major>\\d+)\\.(?<minor>\\d+)\\.(?<patch>\\d+)(:?-(?<compatibility>.*-r)(?<build>\\d+))?$"
    }
  ]
}