This is a GitHub Action that given an organization or specified repositories, opens an issue/PR if dependabot is not enabled, or there are more package ecosystems that could be. It also enables automated security updates for the repository.
This action was developed by the GitHub OSPO for our own use and developed in a way that we could open source it that it might be useful to you as well! If you want to know more about how we use it, reach out in an issue in this repository.
- As a part of the security team for my company, I want to make sure that all of the repositories in the company organizations are regularly updating their dependencies to ensure they are using the most secure version of the dependency available.
- As an OSPO or maintainer, I want to automate everything I can to keep maintaining my project(s) easy and efficient.
If you need support using this project or have questions about it, please open up an issue in this repository. Requests made directly to GitHub staff or support team will be redirected here to open an issue. GitHub SLA's and support/services contracts do not apply to this repository.
All feedback regarding our GitHub Actions, as a whole, should be communicated through issues on our github-ospo repository.
- Create a repository to host this GitHub Action or select an existing repository.
- Select a best fit workflow file from the examples below.
- Copy that example into your repository (from step 1) and into the proper directory for GitHub Actions:
.github/workflows/directory with the file extension.yml(ie..github/workflows/evergreen.yml) - Edit the values (
ORGANIZATION,REPOSITORY,EXEMPT_REPOS,TYPE,TITLE,BODY) from the sample workflow with your information. If running on a whole organization then no repository is needed. If running the action on just one repository or a list of repositories, then no organization is needed. The type should be eitherissueorpullrepresenting the action that you want taken after discovering a repository that should enable dependabot. - Optionally, edit the value (
CREATED_AFTER_DATE) if you are setting up this action to run regularly and only want newly created repositories to be considered. Otherwise, if you want all specified repositories regardless of when they were created to be considered, then leave blank. - Optionally edit the value (
UPDATE_EXISTING) if you want to update existing dependabot configuration files. If set totrue, the action will update the existing dependabot configuration file with any package ecosystems that are detected but not configured yet. If set tofalse, the action will only create a new dependabot configuration file if there is not an existing one. The default value isfalse. - Also edit the value for
GH_ENTERPRISE_URLif you are using a GitHub Server and not using github.com. For github.com users, don't put anything in here. - Update the value of
GH_TOKEN. Do this by creating a GitHub API token with permissions to read the repository/organization and write issues or pull requests depending on what you put in for theTYPE. Additionally, you should set theadministration:writepermission on every repository in scope to successfully enable security updates. Then take the value of the API token you just created, and create a repository secret where the name of the secret isGH_TOKENand the value of the secret the API token. Then finally update the workflow file to use that repository secret by changingGH_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}toGH_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GH_TOKEN }}. The name of the secret can really be anything. It just needs to match between when you create the secret name and when you refer to it in the workflow file. - If you want the resulting issue with the output to appear in a different repository other than the one the workflow file runs in, update the line
token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}with your own GitHub API token stored as a repository secret. This process is the same as described in the step above. More info on creating secrets can be found here. - Commit the workflow file to the default branch (often
masterormain) - Wait for the action to trigger based on the
scheduleentry or manually trigger the workflow as shown in the documentation.
Below are the allowed configuration options:
This action can be configured to authenticate with GitHub App Installation or Personal Access Token (PAT). If all configuration options are provided, the GitHub App Installation configuration has precedence. You can choose one of the following methods to authenticate:
| field | required | default | description |
|---|---|---|---|
GH_APP_ID |
True | "" |
GitHub Application ID. See documentation for more details. |
GH_APP_INSTALLATION_ID |
True | "" |
GitHub Application Installation ID. See documentation for more details. |
GH_APP_PRIVATE_KEY |
True | "" |
GitHub Application Private Key. See documentation for more details. |
| field | required | default | description |
|---|---|---|---|
GH_TOKEN |
True | "" |
The GitHub Token used to scan the repository. Must have read access to all repository you are interested in scanning, repo:write, and workflow privileges to create a pull request. |
| field | required | default | description |
|---|---|---|---|
GH_ENTERPRISE_URL |
False | "" | The GH_ENTERPRISE_URL is used to connect to an enterprise server instance of GitHub. github.com users should not enter anything here. |
ORGANIZATION |
Required to have ORGANIZATION or REPOSITORY |
The name of the GitHub organization which you want this action to work from. ie. github.com/github would be github |
|
REPOSITORY |
Required to have ORGANIZATION or REPOSITORY |
The name of the repository and organization which you want this action to work from. ie. github/evergreen or a comma separated list of multiple repositories github/evergreen,super-linter/super-linter |
|
EXEMPT_REPOS |
False | "" | These repositories will be exempt from this action considering them for dependabot enablement. ex: If my org is set to github then I might want to exempt a few of the repos but get the rest by setting EXEMPT_REPOS to github/evergreen,github/contributors |
TYPE |
False | pull | Type refers to the type of action you want taken if this workflow determines that dependabot could be enabled. Valid values are pull or issue. |
TITLE |
False | "Enable Dependabot" | The title of the issue or pull request that will be created if dependabot could be enabled. |
BODY |
False | Pull Request: "Dependabot could be enabled for this repository. Please enable it by merging this pull request so that we can keep our dependencies up to date and secure." Issue: "Please update the repository to include a Dependabot configuration file. This will ensure our dependencies remain updated and secure.Follow the guidelines in creating Dependabot configuration files to set it up properly.Here's an example of the code:" | The body of the issue or pull request that will be created if dependabot could be enabled. |
COMMIT_MESSAGE |
False | "Create dependabot.yaml" | The commit message for the pull request that will be created if dependabot could be enabled. |
CREATED_AFTER_DATE |
False | none | If a value is set, this action will only consider repositories created on or after this date for dependabot enablement. This is useful if you want to only consider newly created repositories. If I set up this action to run weekly and I only want to scan for repos created in the last week that need dependabot enabled, then I would set CREATED_AFTER_DATE to 7 days ago. That way only repositories created after 7 days ago will be considered for dependabot enablement. If not set or set to nothing, all repositories will be scanned and a duplicate issue/pull request may occur. Ex: 2023-12-31 for Dec. 31st 2023 |
UPDATE_EXISTING |
False | False | If set to true, this action will update the existing dependabot configuration file with any package ecosystems that are detected but not configured yet. If set to false, the action will only create a new dependabot configuration file if there is not an existing one. |
PROJECT_ID |
False | "" | If set, this will assign the issue or pull request to the project with the given ID. ( The project ID on GitHub can be located by navigating to the respective project and observing the URL's end.) The ORGANIZATION variable is required |
DRY_RUN |
False | False | If set to true, this action will not create any issues or pull requests. It will only log the repositories that could have dependabot enabled. This is useful for testing. |
GROUP_DEPENDENCIES |
False | false | If set to true, dependabot configuration will group dependencies updates based on dependency type (production or development, where supported) |
FILTER_VISIBILITY |
False | "public,private,internal" | Use this flag to filter repositories in scope by their visibility (public, private, internal). By default all repository are targeted. ex: to ignore public repositories set this value to private,internal. |
BATCH_SIZE |
False | None | Set this to define the maximum amount of eligible repositories for every run. This is useful if you are targeting large organizations and you don't want to flood repositories with pull requests / issues. ex: if you want to target 20 repositories per time, set this to 20. |
ENABLE_SECURITY_UPDATES |
False | true | If set to true, Evergreen will enable Dependabot security updates on target repositories. Note that the GitHub token needs to have the administration:write permission on every repository in scope to successfully enable security updates. |
EXEMPT_ECOSYSTEMS |
False | "" | A list of package ecosystems to exempt from the generated dependabot configuration. To ignore ecosystems set this to one or more of bundler,cargo, composer, pip, docker, npm, gomod, mix, nuget, github-actions and terraform. ex: if you don't want Dependabot to update Dockerfiles and Github Actions you can set this to docker,github-actions. |
REPO_SPECIFIC_EXEMPTIONS |
False | "" | A list of repositories that should be exempt from specific package ecosystems similar to EXEMPT_ECOSYSTEMS but those apply to all repositories. ex: org1/repo1:docker,github-actions;org1/repo2:pip would set exempt_ecosystems for org1/repo1 to be ['docker', 'github-actions'], and for org1/repo2 it would be ['pip'], while for every other repository evaluated, it would be set by the env variable EXEMPT_ECOSYSTEMS. NOTE: If you want specific exemptions to be added on top of the already specified global exemptions, you need to add the global exemptions to each repo specific exemption. |
---
name: Weekly dependabot checks
on:
workflow_dispatch:
schedule:
- cron: '3 2 * * 6'
permissions:
contents: read
jobs:
evergreen:
name: evergreen
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
permissions:
issues: write
steps:
- name: Run evergreen action
uses: github/evergreen@v1
env:
GH_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
ORGANIZATION: <YOUR_ORGANIZATION_GOES_HERE>---
name: Weekly dependabot checks
on:
workflow_dispatch:
schedule:
- cron: '3 2 * * 6'
permissions:
contents: read
jobs:
evergreen:
name: evergreen
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
permissions:
issues: write
steps:
- shell: bash
run: |
# Get the current date
current_date=$(date +'%Y-%m-%d')
# Calculate the previous month
previous_date=$(date -d "$current_date -7 day" +'%Y-%m-%d')
echo "$previous_date..$current_date"
echo "one_week_ago=$previous_date" >> "$GITHUB_ENV"
- name: Run evergreen action
uses: github/evergreen@v1
env:
GH_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
ORGANIZATION: <YOUR_ORGANIZATION_GOES_HERE>
EXEMPT_REPOS: "org_name/repo_name_1, org_name/repo_name_2"
TITLE: "Add dependabot configuration"
BODY: "Please add this dependabot configuration so that we can keep the dependencies in this repo up to date and secure. for help, contact XXX"
CREATED_AFTER_DATE: ${{ env.one_week_ago }}
- Make sure you have at least Python3.11 installed
- Copy
.env-exampleto.env - Fill out the
.envfile with a token from a user that has access to the organization to scan (listed below). Tokens should have at least write:org access for organization scanning and write:repository for repository scanning. - Fill out the
.envfile with the configuration parameters you want to use pip3 install -r requirements.txt- Run
python3 ./evergreen.py, which will output everything in the terminal
Looking for more resources for your open source program office (OSPO)? Check out the github-ospo repo for a variety of tools designed to support your needs.
![dependabot[bot] avatar](https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/in/29110?v=4 "dependabot[bot]")
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