You can use Dependabot security updates or manual pull requests to easily update vulnerable dependencies.
Users with write access
You can enable Dependabot security updates for any repository that uses Dependabot alerts and the dependency graph. For more information, see About Dependabot security updates.
You can enable or disable Dependabot security updates for an individual repository, for a selection of repositories in an organization, or for all repositories owned by your personal account or organization. For more information about enabling security features in an organization, see Enabling security features in your organization.
Note
When Dependabot security updates are enabled for a repository, Dependabot will automatically try to open pull requests to resolve every open Dependabot alert that has an available patch. If you prefer to customize which alerts Dependabot opens pull requests for, you should leave Dependabot security updates disabled and create an auto-triage rule. For more information, see Customizing auto-triage rules to prioritize Dependabot alerts.
Dependabot and all related features are covered by GitHub's Terms of Service.
GitHub automatically enables Dependabot security updates for newly created repositories if your personal account or organization has enabled Automatically enable for new repositories for Dependabot security updates. For more information, see Managing Dependabot security updates for your repositories.
If you create a fork of a repository that has security updates enabled, GitHub will automatically disable Dependabot security updates for the fork. You can then decide whether to enable Dependabot security updates on the specific fork.
If security updates are not enabled for your repository and you don't know why, first try enabling them using the instructions given in the procedural sections below. If security updates are still not working, you can contact us through the GitHub Support portal.
You can enable or disable Dependabot security updates for all qualifying repositories owned by your personal account or organization. For more information, see Managing security and analysis features or Managing security and analysis settings for your organization.
You can also enable or disable Dependabot security updates for an individual repository.
On GitHub, navigate to the main page of the repository.
Under your repository name, click Settings. If you cannot see the "Settings" tab, select the dropdown menu, then click Settings.
In the "Security" section of the sidebar, click Advanced Security.
To the right of "Dependabot security updates," click Enable to enable the feature or Disable to disable it. For public repositories, the button is disabled if the feature is always enabled.
To reduce the number of pull requests you may be seeing, you can enable grouped security updates for your repository or organization. When this is enabled, Dependabot will group security updates into one pull request for each package ecosystem. In order to use grouped security updates, you must first enable the following features:
When grouped security updates are first enabled, Dependabot will immediately try to create grouped pull requests. You may notice Dependabot closing old pull requests and opening new ones.
You can enable grouped pull requests for Dependabot security updates in one, or both, of the following ways.
dependabot.yml
If you have configured group rules for Dependabot security updates in a dependabot.yml file, all available updates will be grouped according to the rules you've specified. Dependabot will only group across those directories not configured in your dependabot.yml if the setting for grouped security updates at the organization or repository level is also enabled.
Repository administrators can enable or disable grouped security updates for their repository. Changing the repository setting will override any default organization settings. Group rules configured in a dependabot.yml file will override the user interface settings for enabling or disabling grouped security updates at the organization or repository level.
Under "Dependabot," to the right of "Grouped security updates," click Enable to enable the feature or Disable to disable it.
You can enable grouped Dependabot security updates into a single pull request. For more information, see Configuring global security settings for your organization.
You can override the default behavior of Dependabot security updates by adding a dependabot.yml file to your repository. With a dependabot.yml file, you can have more granular control of grouping, and override the default behavior of Dependabot security updates settings.
Use the groups option with the applies-to: security-updates key to create sets of dependencies (per package manager), so that Dependabot opens a single pull request to update multiple dependencies at the same time. You can define groups by package name (the patterns and exclude-patterns keys), dependency type (dependency-type key), and SemVer (the update-types key).
groups
applies-to: security-updates
patterns
exclude-patterns
dependency-type
update-types
Dependabot creates groups in the order they appear in your dependabot.yml file. If a dependency update could belong to more than one group, it is only assigned to the first group it matches with.
If you only require security updates and want to exclude version updates, you can set open-pull-requests-limit to 0 in order to prevent version updates for a given package-ecosystem.
open-pull-requests-limit
0
package-ecosystem
For more information about the configuration options available for security updates, see Customizing pull requests for Dependabot security updates.
# Example configuration file that: # - Has a private registry # - Ignores lodash dependency # - Disables version-updates # - Defines a group by package name, for security updates for golang dependencies version: 2 registries: example: type: npm-registry url: https://example.com token: ${{secrets.NPM_TOKEN}} updates: - package-ecosystem: "npm" directory: "/src/npm-project" schedule: interval: "daily" # For Lodash, ignore all updates ignore: - dependency-name: "lodash" # Disable version updates for npm dependencies open-pull-requests-limit: 0 registries: - example - package-ecosystem: "gomod" groups: golang: applies-to: security-updates patterns: - "golang.org*"
In order for Dependabot to use this configuration for security updates, the directory must be the path to the manifest files, and you should not specify a target-branch.
directory
target-branch