How to make Renovate upgrade only to LTS versions?

[bzakdd]

What would you like help with?

Other

How are you running Renovate?

Self-hosted

If you're self-hosting Renovate, tell us which platform (GitHub, GitLab, etc) and which version of Renovate.

Github / Renovate latest from dockerhub

Please tell us more about your question or problem

How to make Renovate upgrade software to LTS versions only? I know that java has a specific preset:
https://docs.renovatebot.com/presets-workarounds/#workaroundsjavaltsversions
What about the other software?

Logs (if relevant)

No response

[rarkins]

You need to be more specific. Naturally Renovate cannot know the LTS status of all software on the planet, but if there are distributions like Java, Node, Ubuntu etc which are widely used then we add awareness.

[bzakdd]

I am asking generally, because we want to apply this to many different types of software. I want to understand how can we support it with Renovate. There are some examples that I can solve:
Downloading latest LTS jenkins version van be done via customDatasource that finds LTS version from https://get.jenkins.io/war-stable/:

"customDatasources": {
      "jenkins-lts": {
        "defaultRegistryUrlTemplate": "https://get.jenkins.io/war-stable/",
        "format": "html"
      }
    }

---

Finding the latest chrome version can be done by checking the searching through the debian Packages file:

    "customDatasources": {
      "apt_google-chrome-stable": {
        "defaultRegistryUrlTemplate": "https://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/dists/stable/main/binary-amd64/Packages",
        "format": "plain"
      }
    }

Then finding name of binary google-chrome-stable with extractVersion.

---

However in the both examples it works because they are marked by their maintainers as lts (in the first example) and stable (in the second example). However I don't know how to do it in, for example, case of Ansible:
https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/reference_appendices/release_and_maintenance.html
Here I would need to implement logic that "if line 2.X is the newest, then update to the newest patch under 2.(X-1) line". Can I express it with Renovate?

What other tools does Renovate have to prevent updating to the newest version? My question is a followup of this one.

[rarkins]

If you insist on asking generically, then the answer is that there is no generic solution for LTS in the software industry and hence in Renovate either. LTS awareness needs to be added on a case by case basis, and where it's added then Renovate has reused its stable/unstable terminology to support it (e.g. not upgrading from stable to unstable) although this issue exists to make LTS awareness its own concept separate from stable/unstable: #27632