Include changed files in report

[reduckted]

Tell us more.

What I would like to be able to do is make changes to a Renovate config and see what those changes would do before I merge those changes to the default branch.

The things that I want to check before merging the config changes are:

1. Dependencies that shouldn't be updated won't be.
2. Dependencies that should be updated will be.
3. Are the updates being grouped into the expected set of branches.
4. Are the files modified by post-upgrade commands being found correctly (for example, have I configured the postUpgradeTasks and the corresponding fileFilters correctly).

In #22264 (reply in thread), I mentioned that most of this can be achieved by manually checking out the repository on the branch that you want to check the Renovate config on and using these settings:

• dry-run=full
• platform=local (except for Errors are thrown when using platform=local #36538)
• LOG_LEVEL=debug

Using that combination of settings, you can dig through the log file and find out what will happen. The downside is that the logs are huge, so finding the information that you want is difficult, time consuming, and cannot be parsed into a readable format.

I recently discovered the reportType setting and, despite the fact that it's experimental, I think that the report is perfect for this scenario.

The report currently includes:

• The dependencies that would be updated (this allows for points 1 and 2 to be checked).
• The branches that would be created (this allows for point 3 to be checked).

The only thing missing from the report is the files that will be changed on each branch. If the report included that information, then point 4 can be checked, and then there is a complete solution for checking the Renovate config changes before merging to the default branch. The report can be saved to a JSON file, which means I can perform any custom parsing or transformations myself instead of having to get Renovate to produce a nicely formatted report (for example, a Markdown file is what I would like to create).

Here's an example of what the report file currently looks like (with some irrelevant bits removed for brevity):

{
  "problems": [],
  "repositories": {
    "local": {
      "branches": [
        {
          "branchName": "renovate/all",
          "prNo": null,
          "prTitle": "Update all dependencies",
          "result": "pr-created",
          "upgrades": [
            {
              "datasource": "dotnet-version",
              "depName": "dotnet-sdk",
              "displayPending": "",
              "fixedVersion": "9.0.203",
              "currentVersion": "9.0.203",
              "currentValue": "9.0.203",
              "newValue": "9.0.301",
              "newVersion": "9.0.301",
              "packageFile": "global.json",
              "updateType": "patch",
              "packageName": "dotnet-sdk"
            }
          ]
        }
      ]
    }
  }
}

And this is what I would like to add to the report:

 {
   "problems": [],
   "repositories": {
     "local": {
       "branches": [
         {
           "branchName": "renovate/all",
           "prNo": null,
           "prTitle": "Update all dependencies",
           "result": "pr-created",
+          "files": [
+            {
+              "path": "global.json",
+              "type": "addition"
+            }
+          ],
           "upgrades": [
             {
               "datasource": "dotnet-version",
               "depName": "dotnet-sdk",
               "displayPending": "",
               "fixedVersion": "9.0.203",
               "currentVersion": "9.0.203",
               "currentValue": "9.0.203",
               "newValue": "9.0.301",
               "newVersion": "9.0.301",
               "packageFile": "global.json",
               "updateType": "patch",
               "packageName": "dotnet-sdk"
             }
           ]
         }
       ]
     }
   }
 }

[jamietanna]

The BranchCache type would need to know what files are changed (as it currently doesn't) so we can then include that data in the resulting output

As far as I can tell, making this change would also make it straightforward to populate this data available in DEBUG: branches info extended (which is good)

[IldarMinaev]

I have a related use case for this report: testing shared Renovate presets and custom managers in CI.
The JSON report can already be used to verify the packageFiles produced during extraction. To test autoReplaceStringTemplate, CI also needs to verify the resulting file contents without parsing debug logs.
PR #41718 added rawContents to dry-run commit logs. Could the report include the resulting content, or a unified diff, in addition to the changed file paths proposed in this discussion?
I understand that platform=local stops before the update phase, as described in #36538. Supporting that part of local testing may need to be addressed separately.