Forking Renovate: repo stuck disabled after onboarding PR was closed, even though a config file has been on the default branch since

[Yicong-Huang]

How are you running Renovate?

Mend-hosted "Forking Renovate" app, on an Apache Software Foundation repository: apache/texera.

Describe the problem

The repository appears to be stuck in a disabled state (disabled-closed-onboarding?) at the hosted-app side. The onboarding PR was closed unmerged, but a Renovate config file landed on the default branch 47 minutes later — and since then no Renovate job seems to have processed the repo at all, despite many webhook events.

Timeline (all UTC, 2026):

• Jul 24 06:40 — Forking Renovate opened onboarding PR apache/texera#6855.
• Jul 24 20:35 — We closed chore: Configure Renovate 2 apache/texera#6855 unmerged (intending to land a curated config via our own PR instead). The bot commented "Renovate is disabled because there is no Renovate configuration file…" — accurate at that moment.
• Jul 24 21:22 — apache/texera#6848 merged, adding .github/renovate.json5 (extends config:recommended) to the default branch and removing .github/dependabot.yml.
• Since then — no Renovate activity whatsoever: no Dependency Dashboard issue, no PR description updates, and the bot's fork (renovate-bot/apache-_-texera) has had no bot pushes.

Events that should have enqueued a job but produced no visible reaction:

• Multiple pushes to main after the config file landed (the repo is active; the config-file push itself included).
• Jul 25 08:07 — reopened onboarding PR chore: Configure Renovate 2 apache/texera#6855.
• Jul 25 08:26 — maintainer push to the onboarding branch (renovate/configure), rebasing it onto current main and editing .github/renovate.json5 (per the "Reconfigure via PR" docs).
• Jul 25 09:11 — closed chore: Configure Renovate 2 apache/texera#6855 again and renamed it to "chore: Configure Renovate 2" (per the "rename the closed onboarding PR" re-enable path).

What we're asking

Could Mend staff check the hosted app's state for apache/texera and reset the disabled flag / trigger a job? Per the docs, committing a config file to the default branch should (re-)onboard the repo, and per #22982 that push normally triggers a run — but here nothing has happened in ~12+ hours.

Note: as an ASF repo, the GitHub app installation is managed org-wide by ASF Infra; we (committers) may not have installation-admin access on developer.mend.io.

Logs

No self-hosted logs available (hosted app). Happy to provide anything else needed.

[RahulGautamSingh]

cc @jamietanna @nabeelsaabna

[jamietanna]

Thanks Rahul! Also labelling with mend-app puts this into our internal queue too :D

[nabeelsaabna]

Did you try to trigger a job manually from the developer.mend.io UI ?
Note: connect to the forking app using the link on the login page (not the default big GitHub button)

[Yicong-Huang]

Hi @nabeelsaabna thanks for the help, unfortunately as ASF controls the admin access to the app, individual project cannot access the developer.mend.io.

Thus we wonder if you could help trigger the pipeline once manually, to read our existing config? Thanks!

[nabeelsaabna]

INFO: Repository finished
    {
      "cloned": true,
      "durationMs": 233406,
      "result": "external-host-error",
      "status": "onboarded",
      "enabled": true,
      "onboarded": true
    }

[Yicong-Huang]

Great thanks a lot for taking care of this! Looks like we are onboarded now and just need to wait for Monday to trigger PRs. Looking forward to that!

[jamietanna]

Let us know if there are any issues today, and if PRs are raised as expected, we can close :)

[Yicong-Huang]

yes we saw PRs today! I think we can close the discussion. Thanks a lot!