Docs

Deprecations

Description

Deprecated settings still work. Updatecli accepts the old form, logs a warning, and translates it to the new one, so a manifest written years ago keeps running. The warning is the notice: nothing on this page breaks a pipeline today, and everything on it may break one eventually.

Entries are grouped by area, newest deprecation first within each group. The Since column is the first release that emitted the warning, established from the Git history rather than from the release notes (see the changelogs for what shipped in each release).

Tip
To find out whether your own manifests are affected, run updatecli pipeline diff and read the warnings. Nothing needs to be applied, a diff parses and validates the whole manifest, which is where the deprecation warnings come from.

Two cases on this page are not simple renames, and both are easy to miss:

  • commitmessage.title is ignored, not translated - see Commit messages.

  • Moving a json, toml, or csv resource to dasel/v3 turns query into a hard error - see Dasel engines.

Commands

The four original top-level commands moved under pipeline and manifest. All four still run and log Deprecated command, please instead use …​.

DeprecatedUse insteadSince

updatecli apply

updatecli pipeline apply

v0.114.0

updatecli diff

updatecli pipeline diff

v0.114.0

updatecli prepare

updatecli pipeline prepare

v0.114.0

updatecli show

updatecli manifest show

v0.31.0

See the Commands reference for the current command tree.

Manifest keys

Stage identifiers

Mixed-case and snake_case keys were normalised to lowercase. The old spelling is copied onto the new key and cleared.

DeprecatedUse insteadApplies toSince

scmID

scmid

sources, conditions, targets, actions

v0.23.0

sourceID

sourceid

conditions, targets

v0.23.0

depends_on

dependson

sources, conditions, targets

v0.34.0

conditionids

dependson, with each entry prefixed condition#

targets

v0.86.0

conditionids is the one that changes shape rather than spelling. A target listing conditionids: [check] becomes:

targets:
  default:
    dependson:
      - condition#check

Updatecli performs that translation itself and, in doing so, also sets disableconditions: true on the target (the conditions named in dependson are the only ones that gate it).

Important
Setting the old key and the new key together is not a warning. conditionids combined with dependson makes Updatecli ignore conditionids; conditionids combined with disableconditions: true is an outright error, because disabling conditions while naming conditions is contradictory. The same applies to scmID alongside scmid on an action.

Resource kind values must also be lowercase. A capitalised kind is accepted and lowercased with kind value "…​" must be lowercase.

Top-level keys

DeprecatedUse insteadNotesSince

pullrequests

actions

Mutually exclusive - using both is an error, not a warning

v0.40.0

title

name

Names the manifest

v0.64.1

autodiscovery.pullrequestid

autodiscovery.actionid

Mutually exclusive - using both is an error

v0.40.0

Action kinds

Both were renamed when actions grew beyond pull requests. Deprecated since v0.40.0.

DeprecatedUse instead

kind: github

kind: github/pullrequest

kind: gitea

kind: gitea/pullrequest

Transformers

Every camelCase transformer was renamed to lowercase in v0.25.0. The behaviour is unchanged.

DeprecatedUse instead

addPrefix

addprefix

addSuffix

addsuffix

trimPrefix

trimprefix

trimSuffix

trimsuffix

semverInc

semverinc

findSubMatch

findsubmatch

findSubMatch.captureIndex

findsubmatch.captureindex

The deprecated spellings are hidden from the JSON schema, so an editor completing from the schema will only ever offer the lowercase form. See the "Transformer" page.

Actions

github/pullrequest: automerge

Deprecated in v0.116.0 in favour of merge.strategy, which offers three behaviours where automerge had two.

BeforeAfter
actions:
  default:
    kind: github/pullrequest
    spec:
      automerge: true
actions:
  default:
    kind: github/pullrequest
    spec:
      merge:
        strategy: auto

automerge: false is not a no-op, it translates to merge.strategy: manual:

Old valueTranslates toMeaning

automerge: true

merge.strategy: auto

Hand the pull request to GitHub’s auto-merge, which merges it once the required checks pass.

automerge: false

merge.strategy: manual

Leave the pull request open for a human. This is also the default when merge is unset.

- (no equivalent)

merge.strategy: client

Updatecli merges the pull request itself, after merge.after has elapsed (24h by default).

client has no automerge equivalent, so it is only reachable after migrating. See the "GitHub Pull Request" page.

Resource plugins

Dasel engines

json, toml, and csv read and write through Dasel, selected by the engine parameter. dasel/v1 and dasel/v2 are deprecated in favour of dasel/v3 (since v0.105.0):

Engine "dasel/v1" is deprecated and will be removed in a future updatecli version. Please use "dasel/v3" instead.
Warning

dasel/v1 is still the default. A json, toml, or csv resource that never mentions engine runs on the deprecated engine and emits that warning on every run. Set the engine explicitly to silence it:

sources:
  default:
    kind: json
    spec:
      engine: dasel/v3
      file: package.json
      key: .version

engine: dasel is an alias that always resolves to the newest engine, currently dasel/v3. It is not deprecated, but it does mean the behaviour of your manifest changes when a new engine lands.

Migrating the engine forces a second change. Under dasel/v2 and dasel/v3, query is rejected rather than warned about:

engine "dasel/v3" requires the parameter "key" over "query"

So rename query to key in the same edit.

Deprecated parameters

PluginDeprecatedUse insteadNotesSince

json, toml, csv

query

key

Warning under dasel/v1, hard error under dasel/v2 and dasel/v3

v0.105.0

json, toml, csv

multiple

query

key + multiple is rewritten to query

v0.37.0

maven

url

repository

Prefix the old URL onto the repository name

v0.33.0

cargopackage

indexurl

registry.url

Copied across automatically

v0.44.0

githubrelease

key: name

key: tagname

v0.97.0

githubrelease

key: hash

key: taghash

v0.97.0

Commit messages

Warning

commitmessage.title is ignored, not renamed (deprecated in v0.114.0). The commit title is now always generated from the target name (or its description), so a manifest that sets it sees no effect at all beyond the warning:

commitMessage.title is deprecated and will be ignored. The commit title is now always generated from the target name or description.

To control the commit title, rename the target. Everything else under commitmessage (type, scope, body, footers, hidecredit) still applies.

YAML key syntax

Warning

yaml keys are expected to be JSONPath expressions beginning with $.. A key written in the older dotted form is rewritten automatically and warned about, since v0.51.0:

current yaml key is "spec.version" and should be updated to "$.spec.version"

The rewrite is scheduled to become an error. Update the keys now:

DeprecatedUse instead

key: spec.version

key: $.spec.version

key: metadata.annotations.example\.com/version

key: $.metadata.annotations.'example.com/version'

This applies to key and to every entry in keys, on sources, conditions, and targets alike.

Compose file name

The default compose file was renamed from update-compose.yaml to updatecli-compose.yaml in v0.80.0. The old name is still picked up, with a warning:

Deprecated default compose file "update-compose.yaml" detected. Please rename it to "updatecli-compose.yaml"

If both files exist, Updatecli uses the deprecated one and says so:

Both default compose files "update-compose.yaml" and "updatecli-compose.yaml" detected. Please remove "update-compose.yaml" to start using "updatecli-compose.yaml"

Renaming the file is the whole migration. See the "Compose" page.

updatecli-action

Branches v1 and v2

The v1 and v2 branches of updatecli/updatecli-action are deprecated. Pin a released version instead, or track main if you deliberately want the branch tip.

Across a whole organization, an Updatecli policy does the migration for you:

updatecli-compose.yaml
## Migrate every repository of an organization to a released
## version of the Updatecli GitHub Action.
##
##   export UPDATECLI_GITHUB_TOKEN="your PAT"
##   export UPDATECLI_GITHUB_USERNAME="your username"
##   updatecli compose diff
##   updatecli compose apply

valuesinline:
  scm:
    enabled: true
    kind: githubsearch
    search: |
      org:your-github-organization
      archived:false
    # branch accepts a regular expression
    branch: "^main$|^master$"
    # the email associated with the git commits
    email: "you@example.com"
    # zero means no repository limit
    limit: 0

policies:
  - name: Update Updatecli GitHub action version
    policy: ghcr.io/updatecli/policies/updatecli/githubaction:0.9.0

Then:

updatecli compose diff
updatecli compose apply

See the "GitHub Action" page for how to pin the action, and "Compose" for the file format.

Go Further

Last updated on July 30, 2026
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