Ability to fallback to the native RegExp OR be able to change regex engine

[songkeys]

What would you like Renovate to be able to do?

I'm trying to specify a regex for ignoreDeps to allow only a certain group of packages to be checked and updated, but it turns out that ignoreDeps only supports strings.

So I turned to the packageRules with the following configuration:

    packageRules: [
      {
        packagePatterns: ["^(?!@abc)"], // i.e. i only want packages like `@abc/xxx` to be checked
        enabled: false,
      },
    ],

As you can see here, I used the negative lookahead feature of regex, which is unfortunately not supported by re2 engine. It will throw a SyntaxError.

Did you already have any implementation ideas?

Here's some suggestions and solutions:

1. The re2 library suggests us using a try catch fallback for the missing features, which seems quite reasonable for renovate.
2. Or, there should be an option to let us choose which regex engine to use. (I know there are some potential vulnerabilities but the re2 library is not perfect under some cases.)
3. Add allowDeps option with regex patterns so that I could use ^@abc instead. (Some other options like ignoreDeps and ignorePaths should also be supported with regex patterns for consistence.)

[viceice]

You can simply use excludePackagePatterns

    packageRules: [
      {
        excludePackagePatterns: ["^@abc\\/"], // i.e. i only want packages like `@abc/xxx` to be checked
        enabled: false,
      },
    ],

or

[songkeys]

Thank you so much. This configuration works! I missed this option.

Adding this suggestion to https://docs.renovatebot.com/configuration-options/#ignoredeps section might help.

[rarkins]

FYI the reason for using re2 is to prevent DDoS attacks, so we're not going to fall back to regular regex for that reason.