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Add Dependabot for GitHub actions

Open SeanKilleen opened this issue 2 years ago • 7 comments

Recommended as a follow-up to #476 to ensure the actions we're using are kept up to date.

Example at https://github.com/nunit/docs/blob/master/.github/dependabot.yml

SeanKilleen avatar Jan 22 '23 15:01 SeanKilleen

@SeanKilleen Will this make any difference? Currently, we just get the actions directly from main, so I guess they are always the newest?

mikkelbu avatar Jan 22 '23 16:01 mikkelbu

Probably better to peg the GitHub actions to a known major version and then consciously update via Dependabot. Easier to reason about.

SeanKilleen avatar Jan 22 '23 17:01 SeanKilleen

@SeanKilleen For my work we had to update actions/checkout and actions/setup-dotnet (from 2 to 3) because of dependabot. It is a hassle to do that for lots of repositories. What downside do you see to use @main so we always have the latest released version? The only one I could think of is incompatibility when the next major version uses different parameters.

manfred-brands avatar May 01 '23 00:05 manfred-brands

@mikkelbu @manfred-brands pulling from main means sometimes actions will break, breaking the whole process, and you won't necessarily know why. I wouldn't grab actions from main for the same reason I wouldn't pull in the main branch of library code that I'm using -- I want to make it easier to reason about the changes, understand release notes, look at upgrade guides as necessary, see new features I might not have considered before.

It's a preference, but it's helped me avoid issues several times so it's part of my standard practice now wherever I operate.

SeanKilleen avatar May 01 '23 14:05 SeanKilleen

@manfred-brands re: "hassle to do that for lots of repositories" - if you're re-using the same steps across multiple repositories, I think the preferred way would be to use a shared action across all those repositories and put dependabot on that one shared action. https://docs.github.com/en/actions/creating-actions/sharing-actions-and-workflows-with-your-organization

SeanKilleen avatar May 01 '23 14:05 SeanKilleen

@SeanKilleen I do understand that pulling from main could break something, but we have that now if pre-installed software on a runner (e.g. Azure pipeline) is updated, we even had that when installing 6.0.x and MS broke things in a feature update (6.0.300).

I don't see how a shared action solves the multiple update problem as still all repositories would need updating to the next version of that action, unless you use 'main' for that shared action version.

manfred-brands avatar May 01 '23 14:05 manfred-brands

@manfred-brands you can choose to do whatever you'd like 👍 it's just a recommendation based on my past experience with GitHub Actions and the pain that the approach has saved me personally. Just because breakages happen sometimes elsewhere doesn't mean I don't do my best to eliminate them within my sphere of control. If you don't have the intention to do it, feel free to close this.

SeanKilleen avatar May 01 '23 14:05 SeanKilleen