helpers:pinGitHubActionDigestsToSemver silently skips non-semver actions

[dontgitit]

How are you running Renovate?
Self-hosted Renovate CLI (via renovatebot/github-action)

Which platform are you running Renovate on?
GitHub.com

Which version of Renovate are you using?
43.x (action default)

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Please tell us more about your question or problem

The helpers:pinGitHubActionDigestsToSemver preset silently skips GitHub Actions that use major-only tags (e.g., v6, v21) because its extractVersion regex requires full semver:

extractVersion: '^(?<version>v?\\d+\\.\\d+\\.\\d+)$'

This conflicts with the new github-actions versioning added in #42713 / v43.138.0, which correctly handles major-only tags via semver.coerce().

Expected behavior:
Actions using major-only tags should be detected for updates when using helpers:pinGitHubActionDigestsToSemver, since the underlying manager now supports this.

Current behavior:
Actions with major-only tags (e.g., dawidd6/action-download-artifact which uses v6, v21) are silently skipped — no updates are proposed, no warnings appear in the dependency dashboard.

Reproduction:

renovate.json5:

{
  "extends": ["config:recommended", "helpers:pinGitHubActionDigestsToSemver"]
}

Workflow file:

- uses: dawidd6/action-download-artifact@sha # v6

No updates will be proposed for this action despite newer versions existing.

Workaround:

Add a package rule with versioning: loose for affected actions:

{
  "matchPackageNames": ["dawidd6/action-download-artifact"],
  "matchManagers": ["github-actions"],
  "versioning": "loose"
}

Suggested fix:

Update helpers:pinGitHubActionDigestsToSemver to use the new github-actions versioning instead of the custom regex versioning, while preserving the extractVersion regex so that comments still show full semver (e.g., # v6.0.2 instead of # v6).

Related:

• Change default versioning for github-actions #42331 - Change default versioning for github-actions
• feat(manager/github-actions): use github-actions versioning by default #42713 - feat(manager/github-actions): use github-actions versioning by default