When using Renovate with Gitea, Renovate may not be able to create pull requests and/or issues for its found dependency updates. When I track the logs in debug mode, I see a series of “500 internal server error” messages instead.

In my case this was caused by the use of emojis that Renovate writes in its pull requests. Gitea’s MySQL database, tables and columns used the collation uf8mb3_general_ci which does not support emojis.

You can test this by writing an issue in Gitea that contains emojis in the title and body. If you get a 500 error, you are also affected by this issue.

Fix

I was able to fix this by changing the Collation of the Database, Tables and Columns to uf8mb4_general_ci. I recommend to use something like phpMyAdmin to do this automatically with just a button press, as it can be very tideous to do it by hand.