Registry Aliases cannot be used with category matching

[JamesMHenderson]

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.

GitLab, renovate v39.173.1

Please tell us more about your question or problem

We have an issue where we have set registry aliases globally and as they aren't valid for helm dependencies the chart.lock file fails to update with the following error

Error: could not find protocol handler for:

We changed our config to set the aliases for just the docker category and gitlab-ci which as the aliases were now not being set for the helm updates the chart.lock was successfully being updated.

Within our docker files we configure our images to use a harbor cache and define the image like

FROM $CI_REGISTRY_CACHE_LIBRARY/node:22.13.1-slim@sha256:83fdfa2a4de32d7f8d79829ea259bd6a4821f8b2d123204ac467fbe3966450fc as build

These images are now not being updated with the skip reason 'contains-variable

    {
            "skipReason": "contains-variable",
            "replaceString": "$CI_REGISTRY_CACHE_LIBRARY/node:20.18.1-slim@sha256:b2c8e0eb8a6aeeae33b2711f8f516003e27ee45804e270468d937b3214f2f0cc",
            "autoReplaceStringTemplate": "{{depName}}{{#if newValue}}:{{newValue}}{{/if}}{{#if newDigest}}@{{newDigest}}{{/if}}",
            "datasource": "docker",
            "depType": "stage",
            "updates": []
          },

These seems to relate to this issue #5626

Is there a way that we can either stop a global registry alias being applied for a specific manager or allow support for registryAliases defined for just the docker category which supports the use of variables within the docker name.

{
     packageRules:
     [
        {
            'matchCategories': ['docker'],
            'registryAliases': registryAliases,
        }
    ]
}

Logs (if relevant)

Logs

  "dockerfile": [
      {
        "deps": [
          {
            "skipReason": "contains-variable",
            "replaceString": "$CI_REGISTRY_CACHE_LIBRARY/node:20.18.1-slim@sha256:b2c8e0eb8a6aeeae33b2711f8f516003e27ee45804e270468d937b3214f2f0cc",
            "autoReplaceStringTemplate": "{{depName}}{{#if newValue}}:{{newValue}}{{/if}}{{#if newDigest}}@{{newDigest}}{{/if}}",
            "datasource": "docker",
            "depType": "stage",
            "updates": []
          },
          {
            "skipReason": "contains-variable",
            "replaceString": "$CI_REGISTRY/hardened-containers/nginx:1.22-20250203@sha256:907245f113ea9c20d60f4c187d8b234100bb8ed68202b5132c44754f8e14095e",
            "autoReplaceStringTemplate": "{{depName}}{{#if newValue}}:{{newValue}}{{/if}}{{#if newDigest}}@{{newDigest}}{{/if}}",
            "datasource": "docker",
            "depType": "final",
            "updates": []
          }
        ],
        "packageFile": "Dockerfile"
      }
    ],

[rarkins]

Try:

{
  "docker": {
    "registryAliases": ...
  }
}

I think that should work with a category name (e.g. docker) but definitely works with manager names (e.g. dockerfile).

[JamesMHenderson]

I did try to use

{
  "docker": {
    "registryAliases": ...
  }
}

but it gets migrated to

packageRules:
     [
        {
            'matchCategories': ['docker'],
            'registryAliases': ....
        }
    ]

[viceice]

I think categories are applied with manager config, so after your rule is tested. I think you can't use categories with registry aliases because the categories are known to late.

[JamesMHenderson]

Thanks for the clarification @viceice as to why using the category doesn't work.

setting registryAliases on the dockerfile manager works

[viceice]

can you please update the title, so registry aliases can't be used with categories matching?