dependency-review-action

This action scans your pull requests for dependency changes, and will raise an error if any vulnerabilities or invalid licenses are being introduced. The action is supported by an API endpoint that diffs the dependencies between any two revisions on your default branch.

The action is available for all public repositories, as well as private repositories that have GitHub Advanced Security licensed.

You can see the results on the job logs:

or on the job summary:

Installation

Please keep in mind that you need a GitHub Advanced Security license if you're running this action on private repositories.

1. Add a new YAML workflow to your .github/workflows folder:

name: 'Dependency Review'
on: [pull_request]

permissions:
  contents: read

jobs:
  dependency-review:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: 'Checkout Repository'
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: 'Dependency Review'
        uses: actions/dependency-review-action@v4

GitHub Enterprise Server

Make sure GitHub Advanced Security and GitHub Connect are enabled, and that you have installed the dependency-review-action on the server.

You can use the same workflow as above, replacing the runs-on value with the label of any of your runners (the default label is self-hosted):

# ...

jobs:
  dependency-review:
    runs-on: self-hosted
    steps:
      - name: 'Checkout Repository'
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: 'Dependency Review'
        uses: actions/dependency-review-action@v4

Configuration options

Configure this action by either inlining these options in your workflow file, or by using an external configuration file. All configuration options are optional.

Option	Usage	Possible values	Default value
fail-on-severity	Defines the threshold for the level of severity. The action will fail on any pull requests that introduce vulnerabilities of the specified severity level or higher.	low, moderate, high, critical	low
allow-licenses*	Contains a list of allowed licenses. The action will fail on pull requests that introduce dependencies with licenses that do not match the list.	Any SPDX-compliant identifier(s)	none
deny-licenses*	Contains a list of prohibited licenses. The action will fail on pull requests that introduce dependencies with licenses that match the list.	Any SPDX-compliant identifier(s)	none
fail-on-scopes	Contains a list of strings of the build environments you want to support. The action will fail on pull requests that introduce vulnerabilities in the scopes that match the list.	runtime, development, unknown	runtime
allow-ghsas	Contains a list of GitHub Advisory Database IDs that can be skipped during detection.	Any GHSAs from the GitHub Advisory Database	none
license-check	Enable or disable the license check performed by the action.	true, false	true
vulnerability-check	Enable or disable the vulnerability check performed by the action.	true, false	true
allow-dependencies-licenses*	Contains a list of packages that will be excluded from license checks.	Any package(s) in purl format	none
base-ref/head-ref	Provide custom git references for the git base/head when performing the comparison check. This is only used for event types other than pull_request and pull_request_target.	Any valid git ref(s) in your project	none
comment-summary-in-pr	Enable or disable reporting the review summary as a comment in the pull request. If enabled, you must give the workflow or job the pull-requests: write permission.	always, on-failure, never	never
deny-packages	Any number of packages to block in a PR. This option will match on the exact version provided. If no version is provided, the option will treat the specified package as a wildcard and deny all versions.	Package(s) in purl format	empty
deny-groups	Any number of groups (namespaces) to block in a PR.	Namespace(s) in purl format (no package name, no version number)	empty
retry-on-snapshot-warnings*	Enable or disable retrying the action every 10 seconds while waiting for dependency submission actions to complete.	true, false	false
retry-on-snapshot-warnings-timeout*	Maximum amount of time (in seconds) to retry the action while waiting for dependency submission actions to complete.	Any positive integer	120
warn-only+	When set to true, the action will log all vulnerabilities as warnings regardless of the severity, and the action will complete with a success status. This overrides the fail-on-severity option.	true, false	false
show-openssf-scorecard-levels	When set to true, the action will output information about all the known OpenSSF Scorecard scores for the dependencies changed in this pull request.	true, false	true
warn-on-openssf-scorecard-level	When show-openssf-scorecard-levels is set to true, this option lets you configure the threshold for when a score is considered too low and gets a ⚠️ warning in the CI.	Any positive integer	3

*not supported for use with GitHub Enterprise Server

+when warn-only is set to true, all vulnerabilities, independently of the severity, will be reported as warnings and the action will not fail.

Inline Configuration

You can pass options to the Dependency Review GitHub Action using your workflow file.

Example

name: 'Dependency Review'
on: [pull_request]
permissions:
  contents: read
jobs:
  dependency-review:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: 'Checkout Repository'
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: Dependency Review
        uses: actions/dependency-review-action@v4
        with:
          fail-on-severity: moderate

          # Use comma-separated names to pass list arguments:
          deny-licenses: LGPL-2.0, BSD-2-Clause

Configuration File

You can use an external configuration file to specify the settings for this action. It can be a local file or a file in an external repository. Refer to the following options for the specification.

Option	Usage	Possible values
config-file	A path to a file in the current repository or an external repository. Use this syntax for external files: OWNER/REPOSITORY/FILENAME@BRANCH	Local file: ./.github/dependency-review-config.yml External repo: github/octorepo/dependency-review-config.yml@main
external-repo-token	Specifies a token for fetching the configuration file. It is required if the file resides in a private external repository and for all GitHub Enterprise Server repositories. Create a token in developer settings.	Any token with read permissions to the repository hosting the config file.

Example

Start by specifying that you will be using an external configuration file:

- name: Dependency Review
  uses: actions/dependency-review-action@v4
  with:
    config-file: './.github/dependency-review-config.yml'

And then create the file in the path you just specified. Please note that the option names in external files use underscores instead of dashes:

fail_on_severity: 'critical'
allow_licenses:
  - 'GPL-3.0'
  - 'BSD-3-Clause'
  - 'MIT'

For more examples of how to use this action and its configuration options, see the examples page.

Considerations

• Checking for licenses is not supported on Enterprise Server as the API does not return license information.
• The allow-licenses and deny-licenses options are mutually exclusive; an error will be raised if you provide both.
• We don't have license information for all of your dependents. If we can't detect the license for a dependency we will inform you, but the action won't fail.

Blocking pull requests

The Dependency Review GitHub Action check will only block a pull request from being merged if the repository owner has required the check to pass before merging. For more information, see the documentation on protected branches.

Outputs

• comment-content is generated with the same content as would be present in a Dependency Review Action comment.
• dependency-changes holds all dependency changes in a JSON format. The following outputs are subsets of dependency-changes filtered based on the configuration:
• vulnerable-changes holds information about dependency changes with vulnerable dependencies in a JSON format.
• invalid-license-changes holds information about invalid or non-compliant license dependency changes in a JSON format.
• denied-changes holds information about denied dependency changes in a JSON format.

Note

Action outputs are unicode strings with a 1MB size limit.

Important

If you use these outputs in a run-step, you must store the output data in an environment variable instead of using the output directly. Using an output directly might break shell scripts. For example:

env:
  VULNERABLE_CHANGES: ${{ steps.review.outputs.vulnerable-changes }}
run: |
  echo "$VULNERABLE_CHANGES" | jq

instead of direct echo '${{ steps.review.outputs.vulnerable-changes }}'. See examples for more.

Getting help

If you have bug reports, questions or suggestions please create a new issue.

Contributing

We are grateful for any contributions made to this project. Please read CONTRIBUTING.MD to get started.

License

This project is released under the MIT License.