Configuring Renovate to use a separate cache of cloned repositories

[jamietanna]

How are you running Renovate?

Self-hosted Renovate

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

GitHub.com, Mend Renovate 7.5.0

Please tell us more about your question or problem

While looking at improving the performance of our deployment of Renovate, we've noticed that some of our particularly "heavy" repositories - like https://github.com/elastic/kibana - take a significant chunk of time to clone.

When Renovate has a pre-warmed copy of the repository (i.e if the K8s pod isn't recently redeployed) the git fetch can be reasonable, but when using a fresh clone, this can be significantly increased.

We're currently using Mend Renovate Community Edition, but are also looking at whether there are improvements we can make with pure Renovate OSS.

As an organisation, we have some local mirrors of some of our "heavy" repositories, which allow us in CI to perform steps such as:

git clone --reference /path/to/disk/elastic/kibana.git [email protected]:elastic/kibana.git .

We were wondering if there's the capability / appetite to add the capability of, somewhat similar to #24985, providing the ability to an external location for repositories.

We are not currently using https://docs.renovatebot.com/self-hosted-configuration/#repositorycache, Redis or any other caching configuration

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