--- title: dependabot on GitHub slug: dependabot-on-github published_at: 2021-07-02 11:00:23 +0000 updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:14:07 +0000 summary: description: How to setup dependabot to automatically open PRs for security issues and also for general library version updates. #rails #rubyonrails tags: [setup dependabot on GitHub, How to setup dependabot, dependabot, github, dependency management] views: 33441 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/dependabot-on-github youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnBEVPUsuAw youtube_id: TnBEVPUsuAw embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/TnBEVPUsuAw thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/TnBEVPUsuAw/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # dependabot on GitHub *Published: July 02, 2021* *Views: 33441* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnBEVPUsuAw) [![dependabot on GitHub](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/TnBEVPUsuAw/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnBEVPUsuAw) ## Description How to setup dependabot to automatically open PRs for security issues and also for general library version updates. #rails #rubyonrails ## Transcript hey welcome back what's up in this episode we're going to talk about setting up dependable to automatically open pull requests when you have dependencies that are out of date so here i have a repository on github it's private but it doesn't really matter like you'll be able to see what i'm talking about so under security like oftentimes depend about will create alerts for you when there's security vulnerabilities and so you can go in here and you can click enable depend about alerts and that will start depend like giving you alerts when there's depend about issues another thing that you can do so yeah let's actually enable dependable alerts here and then we'll also enable security updates and then from security and analysis i can actually okay so here we go so now in the security tab now we actually have dependabot alerts so right now we have several issues of varying severity on our github repository so we've got some issues with post css and ws and trim new lines and whatever so the very first thing we can do is uh dependable will sometimes open pull requests for these dependencies so i didn't actually like have any pull requests before we just enabled dependable and it started creating poll requests for us so now we can just go into this bump post css dependency we can see which files changed and we can take a look and see if we trust this so let's load the diff for yarn.lock it looks like it's just upgrading from version 7035 to 36 and we can approve the changes and then we can actually like merge these changes in so what's really cool about this is that you um the pandabot will automatically start sort of making these pull requests for you um it's really important to have tests so if you're running anything serious or real that has like production stuff going on then you wanna you wanna have some tests so i'm going to go through the rest of these and merge these in and then i wanted to talk about the next thing here shortly all right so i've got all of those prs merged i still have a couple of security advisories here for dependabot that's okay we're going to go and address these shortly so another thing that we can do though is set up depend about version updates which can help us automatically keep our versions up to date so we can say create a config file this is going to create a new file inside of a dot github directory and it's going to create this dependabot.yaml file and we can give it the package ecosystem i think we can say ruby gems here the directory is slash because that's where our gemfile.lock lives and we can set the schedule to daily i think you can even set it more frequently than that but on a daily basis github will go and look for dependencies where the libraries have updated versions not even if they have security issues but just is there a new version of x library and this will allow you to automatically update so there's several different configuration options for dependency updates you can um you have to give it the package ecosystem directory and the interval for which you want these updates to happen but you can also sort of like add things to an allow list or an ignore list you can have assignees on those pull requests that only certain people are responsible for merging those prs so you can have like several different settings here and this is i think this is built in or like part of sort of tooling that's part of github actions but the pandabot will just start opening these pr's for you on a scheduled basis when there's new versions of the libraries and it is super handy so that you don't have to like go out and check oh is there a new version of action pack somewhere down the line or something so i'm going to say commit this new file you could also create this dependabot.yaml file directly locally if you wanted as long as it's inside of the github directory and now what's happened is dependabot will go through and actually start checking to see if your version if there's any version updates required so let's take a look at this again um okay so ruby gems i got that wrong so it's not rubygems so let's see i'm just gonna search for gem here um oh bundler bundler is the the package ecosystem for for rubygems or for so now i need to go back to my local copy and pull it down from github and you'll notice that there were changes to gemfile gemfile.lock and yarn.lock because these uh these were pr's that i merged from dependabot and then this file was added that's the one that i want to take a look at here and instead of rubygems i want to say bundler and then we'll say add that push it back up to github and then we can refresh this view and now we have this new dependabot sort of dependency that's set up and it's looking at our gem file so now now that now that we see this view we know that it's configured correctly and it's actually going to look at our gem file and here you see checking now so it's checking to see if there's any versions that are that are new um yep so this is going to be the two files that it's taking a look at gemfile and gemfile.lock genfile.lock is where all of your sort of like the specific versions of the gems are locked locked down when you say like gem or like bundle install and so as it's checking sometimes we get brand new pr's that will come in for new versions of things all right so we have one pr that came in so bumping puma from 3.1 to 3.2 so when when dependable found that security issue with puma it bumped it from like 5.2 point something all the way up to 5.3.1 but there is an even newer version there's 5.3.2 you can even look at like the release notes from puma and see like oh does any of this actually matter or um you know is this is this important to our system or whatever but it's also like a nice way to stay on top of dependencies going out of date i have an application that's like a rails 4 or rails 5 app that was written in 2015 the dependencies are so far out of date that it is a nightmare to maintain and so if i had enabled dependabot or if this existed back when i wrote that application then likely a lot of the the technical debt would not exist that i have right now so this is a really powerful tool and it will help keep your dependencies up to date so this again is going to keep our form 4 tracker up to date and this form 4 tracker just for those who are interested is a tool for us to look at form 4 filings from the sec and get some signal and then maybe make some trades on those forms and so we here we have like a bunch of company data um for 8 000 companies and in fact like this is sort of some ideas that it's generated recently and what i've been doing um over the last few days is trading options so i buy like a call option that is you know three or five months out on on some of these on some of these stocks and some of them are up like 500 it's pretty fun i'm just like messing around like it's not it's not significant amount of money but it's fun to play with and so this was something that we built in previous episodes if you wanted to head back and take a look at how we went through the process of adding tailwind and background tasks and dealing with uh lists of things and hitting that old api and ingesting old data and processing things in batches pretty fun project that we built out and now it will stay up to date with dependebot so that is pretty cool i'm excited about that and i've got a few more that i need to go through and clean and update so thanks so much for watching and we'll see you in the next one --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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