Custom labels specified not used

Hello, we are making use of the custom labels feature released in 0.9.0 so that we can differentiate between PR’s that should be automatically merged and those that should be reviewed. In our case, minor and patch bumps would be automatically merged, while major bumps aren’t. The label we are trying to use is simply “automerge”.

The reason why we currently can’t use the autocomplete and auto approve is because our branch policy requires two reviewers. There are steps after dependabot in the pipeline that will find all PR’s with this label and complete them by bypassing policies using the devops rest api.

Here is the script we’re using in the pipeline:

      docker run --rm -t \
        -e GITHUB_ACCESS_TOKEN=$(dependabot-gh-pat) \
        -e AZURE_HOSTNAME=dev.azure.com \
        -e AZURE_ACCESS_TOKEN=$(dependabot-pat) \
        -e AZURE_ORGANIZATION={redacted} \
        -e AZURE_PROJECT=${{ parameters.project }} \
        -e AZURE_REPOSITORY=${{ parameters.repository }} \
        -e DEPENDABOT_DIRECTORY=${{ parameters.directory }} \
        -e DEPENDABOT_MILESTONE=${{ parameters.parent_wi }} \
        -e DEPENDABOT_PACKAGE_MANAGER=${{ parameters.pkg_mgr }} \
        -e DEPENDABOT_VERSIONING_STRATEGY=auto \
        -e DEPENDABOT_OPEN_PULL_REQUESTS_LIMIT=${{ parameters.pr_limit }} \
        -e DEPENDABOT_IGNORE_CONDITIONS='${{ parameters.ignore_cond }}' \
        -e DEPENDABOT_EXTRA_CREDENTIALS={redacted} \
        -e DEPENDABOT_LABELS='["automerge", "dependencies"]' \
        -e AZURE_SET_AUTO_COMPLETE=${{ lower(parameters.autocomplete) }} \
        tingle/dependabot-azure-devops:0.10

I see the following note in the github dependabot docs stating that the labels must already exist, so I ensured the label was added to other PRs first:

You can use labels to override the default labels and specify alternative labels for all pull requests raised for a package manager. You can’t create new labels in the dependabot.yml file, so the alternative labels must already exist in the repository.

After the pipeline completes, we see the dependencies label but not the automerge label. What am I missing?

[mmoreno79]

Submitted https://github.com/tinglesoftware/dependabot-azure-devops/pull/403

[mburumaxwell]

@mmoreno79 there’s still no new release for dependabot since 0.215.0 but the new bits are now available here. Could you test using the specific input dockerImageTag: 0.14.2-ci.7?