# Scenario 1: Setting up Renovate

Renovate is heavily opionated and brings a lot of defaults. To explore how Renovate works, we will restrict execution to the bare minimum and build up each scenario.

## Requirements

- Node.js 25.x

## How to Run

### 1. Run Renovate

```bash
$ npx renovate

Need to install the following packages:
renovate@37.440.7
Ok to proceed? (y) y

FATAL: You must configure a GitHub token
 INFO: Renovate was run at log level "info". Set LOG_LEVEL=debug in environment variables to see extended debug logs.
 INFO: Renovate is exiting with a non-zero code due to the following logged errors
       "loggerErrors": [
         {
           "name": "renovate",
           "level": 60,
           "logContext": "lSbx4z8Fg9mvnJ44Hk3Ji",
           "msg": "You must configure a GitHub token"
         }
       ]
```

This error is expected. Renovate needs a GitHub Personal Access Token (PAT), as Renovate initially wants to create Pull Requests for any pending updates.

### 2. Create a GitHub PAT

See [official documentation](https://docs.renovatebot.com/modules/platform/github/#running-using-a-fine-grained-token).

```bash
$ npx renovate --token=<PAT> --dry-run

 WARN: cli config dryRun property has been changed to full
 WARN: No repositories found - did you want to run with flag --autodiscover?
 INFO: Renovate was run at log level "info". Set LOG_LEVEL=debug in environment variables to see extended debug logs.
```


## Next Steps

Move to the next scenario: [2-dockerfile-dry-run](../2-dockerfile-dry-run)