oxsecurity Force Renovate to act now: find the Dependency Dashboard GitHub issue and tick its checkboxes in the Rate-Limited and Open sections. Renovate watches its own dashboard issue body — a ticked box is an instruction:
- Rate-Limited → create the PRs that
prHourlyLimit/prConcurrentLimitis holding back - Open → retry/rebase every already-created Renovate PR against the current
main
Run this skill straight through to the end without asking the user anything. No confirmation prompts, no AskUserQuestion, no pausing to show a preview — invoking the skill is the authorization. Ticking these boxes is exactly the intended effect, including when it rebases every open Renovate PR and re-triggers their CI.
All the mechanics live in .claude/skills/renovate-rebase/tick_dashboard.py. Do not hand-edit the issue body from the model — the body is ~2000 lines and a manual rewrite risks corrupting the Detected Dependencies section.
Step 1 — Tick the checkboxes
python .claude/skills/renovate-rebase/tick_dashboard.py
That single command finds the dashboard issue (open issue titled Dependency Dashboard, authored by app/renovate), ticks one aggregate checkbox per targeted section, and pushes the new body back with gh issue edit:
- Open →
<!-- rebase-all-open-prs -->Click on this checkbox to rebase all open PRs at once - Rate-Limited →
<!-- create-all-rate-limited-prs -->…force the creation of all rate-limited PRs at once
One aggregate box has the same effect as ticking every line individually, with a far smaller diff on the issue. It is the default — keep it unless the user asked for something else.
Pass extra flags only when $ARGUMENTS asks for something narrower or wider:
| Flag | Effect |
|---|---|
--sections open |
only that section (comma-separated; rate-limited,open is the default) |
--individual |
tick every PR line instead of the section's "all at once" box — use when the user wants specific PRs, or when Renovate rendered no aggregate box |
--trigger-run |
also tick <!-- manual job --> ("run Renovate again on this repository") so the queued requests are picked up on the next poll instead of the next schedule |
--issue N / --title "..." |
when renovate.json overrides dependencyDashboardTitle or several dashboards match |
--repo owner/name |
act on another repo (defaults to the current one) |
--dry-run |
preview only — only when the user explicitly asks for a preview |
The script is self-contained and never prompts. Read its output and keep going:
SECTION ABSENTfor rate-limited is normal, not an error — Renovate only renders that section while it is actually holding PRs back. Carry on with open.no unticked checkboxmeans the request is already pending from an earlier run. Nothing more to do for that section; continue to verification.Nothing changedmeans every targeted request was already pending. Report that and stop — do not retry or escalate to--individual.
If gh is not authenticated the script exits with the gh error; report that and stop, since nothing else in the skill can proceed.
Other sections exist (Pending Status Checks, Awaiting Schedule, PR Edited (Blocked), PR Closed (Blocked)). Only pass them in --sections if the user explicitly asks — the Blocked ones discard commits / recreate closed PRs, which is destructive.
Step 2 — Verify
gh pr list --author "app/renovate" --state open --json number,title,updatedAt --limit 100
Two valid outcomes on the issue itself, both success:
- boxes still show
[x]→ Renovate hasn't polled yet (typically a few minutes on the hosted Mend app) - boxes are back to
[ ]→ Renovate already processed the request and unticked them. This is the expected end state, not a lost edit.
So verify against the PR list rather than the checkbox state: fresh updatedAt timestamps and new PR numbers mean the rebases and rate-limited creations landed. Run the command once — do not poll in a loop waiting for Renovate.
Step 3 — Report
Tell the user, in a few lines: the issue number, which sections were ticked and how many boxes, how many open Renovate PRs will be rebased, and that Renovate acts on its next run (minutes, not instant). If those PRs then need their CI driven to green, point at /pr-watch-fix-renovate.
Safety
- The only mutation is an edit to the Renovate dashboard issue body. No branch, no push, no PR is touched by this skill directly — Renovate itself performs the force-pushes on its own
renovate/*branches. That is why it is safe to run unattended. - Never rewrite the issue body by hand or with a broad
sed; the "Detected Dependencies" block is thousands of lines and must round-trip untouched. The script only flips- [ ]→- [x]inside the targeted sections. - Never tick
PR Closed (Blocked)(recreates PRs the maintainers deliberately closed) orPR Edited (Blocked)(discards manual commits on those branches) without an explicit request from the user. - Run the tick command once per invocation. Renovate needs minutes to process; re-ticking mid-flight just churns CI.