Configuring Dependabot security updates

About configuring Dependabot security updates

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 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.

Dependabot and all related features are covered by GitHub's Terms of Service.

Supported repositories

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.

Managing Dependabot security updates for your repositories

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 settings for your personal account or Managing security and analysis settings for your organization.

You can also enable or disable Dependabot security updates for an individual repository.

Enabling or disabling Dependabot security updates for an individual repository

1. On GitHub, navigate to the main page of the repository.

2. Under your repository name, click Settings. If you cannot see the "Settings" tab, select the dropdown menu, then click Settings.

3. In the "Security" section of the sidebar, click Code security.

4. Under "Code 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.

Grouping Dependabot security updates into a single pull request

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:

• Dependency graph. For more information, see Configuring the dependency graph.
• Dependabot alerts. For more information, see Configuring Dependabot alerts.
• Dependabot security updates. For more information, see Configuring Dependabot security updates.

You can enable grouped pull requests for Dependabot security updates in one, or both, of the following ways.

• To group as many available security updates together as possible, across directories and per ecosystem, enable grouping in the "Code security" settings for your repository, or in "Global settings" under Code security for your organization.
• For more granular control of grouping, such as grouping by package name, development/production dependencies, SemVer level, or across multiple directories per ecosystem, add configuration options to the dependabot.yml configuration file in your repository.

Enabling or disabling grouped Dependabot security updates for an individual repository

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.

1. On GitHub, navigate to the main page of the repository.

2. Under your repository name, click Settings. If you cannot see the "Settings" tab, select the dropdown menu, then click Settings.

3. In the "Security" section of the sidebar, click Code security.

4. Under "Code security", to the right of "Grouped security updates", click Enable to enable the feature or Disable to disable it.

Enabling or disabling grouped Dependabot security updates for an organization

You can enable grouped Dependabot security updates into a single pull request. For more information, see Configuring global security settings for your organization.

Overriding the default behavior with a configuration file

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).

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.

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*"

# 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*"

Further reading

• About Dependabot alerts
• Configuring Dependabot alerts
• Dependency graph supported package ecosystems