Dependabot supported ecosystems and repositories

About Dependabot

Dependabot helps you stay on top of your dependency ecosystems. With Dependabot, you can keep the dependencies you rely on up-to-date, addressing any potential security issues in your supply chain.

Dependabot consists of three different features that help you manage your dependencies:

• Dependabot alerts: Inform you about vulnerabilities in the dependencies that you use in your repository.
• Dependabot security updates: Automatically raise pull requests to update the dependencies you use that have known security vulnerabilities.
• Dependabot version updates: Automatically raise pull requests to keep your dependencies up-to-date.

For more information about Dependabot, see Dependabot quickstart guide.

In this article, you can see what the supported ecosystems and repositories are.

Supported ecosystems and repositories

You can configure updates for repositories that contain a dependency manifest or lock file for one of the supported package managers. For some package managers, you can also configure vendoring for dependencies. For more information, see vendor. Dependabot also supports dependencies in private registries. For more information, see Configuring access to private registries for Dependabot.

If your repository already uses an integration for dependency management, you will need to disable this before enabling Dependabot.

Package manager	YAML value	Supported versions	Version updates	Security updates	Private repositories	Private registries	Vendoring
Bundler	bundler	v1, v2
Cargo	cargo	v1				(Git only)
Composer	composer	v1, v2
Docker	docker	v1					Not applicable
Hex	mix	v1
elm-package	elm	v0.19
git submodule	gitsubmodule	Not applicable					Not applicable
GitHub Actions	github-actions	Not applicable					Not applicable
Go modules	gomod	v1
Gradle	gradle	Not applicable
Maven	maven	Not applicable
npm	npm	v6, v7, v8, v9
NuGet	nuget	<= 4.8
pip	pip	v21.1.2
pipenv	pip	<= 2021-05-29
pip-compile	pip	6.1.0
pnpm	npm	v7, v8, v9		(v7 and v8 only)
poetry	pip	v1
pub	pub	v2
Terraform	terraform	>= 0.13, <= 1.10.x					Not applicable
yarn	npm	v1, v2, v3

For further information about ecosystem support for Dependabot security updates, see also "Dependency graph supported package ecosystems."

Cargo

Private registry support applies to Git registries, and doesn't include cargo registries.

Docker

Dependabot can add metadata from Docker images to pull requests for version updates. The metadata includes release notes, changelogs and the commit history. Repository administrators can use the metadata to quickly evaluate the stability risk of the dependency update.

In order for Dependabot to fetch Docker metadata, maintainers of Docker images must add the org.opencontainers.image.source label to their Dockerfile, and include the URL of the source repository. Additionally, maintainers must tag the repository with the same tags as the published Docker images. For an example, see the dependabot-fixtures/docker-with-source repository. For more information on Docker labels, see Extension image labels and BUILDX_GIT_LABELS in the Docker documentation.

Dependabot can update Docker image tags in Kubernetes manifests. Add an entry to the Docker package-ecosystem element of your dependabot.yml file for each directory containing a Kubernetes manifest which references Docker image tags. Kubernetes manifests can be Kubernetes Deployment YAML files or Helm charts. For information about configuring your dependabot.yml file for docker, see "package-ecosystem" in "Dependabot options reference."

Dependabot supports both public and private Docker registries. For a list of the supported registries, see "docker-registry" in "Configuring access to private registries for Dependabot."

Dependabot parses Docker image tags for Semantic Versioning (SemVer). If Dependabot detects a tag with a pre-release, then it will only suggest an update to the latest version with a matching pre-release, and it will not suggest a newer version that use a different pre-release label. For more information, see the dependabot-docker README.md file in the dependabot/dependabot-core repository.

GitHub Actions

Dependabot supports version updates for GitHub Actions with the following caveats.

• Dependabot only supports updates to GitHub Actions using the GitHub repository syntax, such as actions/checkout@v4. Dependabot will ignore actions or reusable workflows referenced locally (for example, ./.github/actions/foo.yml).
• Docker Hub and GitHub Packages Container registry URLs are currently not supported. For example, references to Docker container actions using docker:// syntax aren't supported.
• Dependabot supports both public and private repositories for GitHub Actions. For private registry configuration options, see "git" in Dependabot options reference.

For more information about using Dependabot version updates with GitHub Actions, see "Using GitHub's security features to secure your use of GitHub Actions."

Gradle

Gradle is supported for Dependabot version updates only.

Dependabot doesn't run Gradle but supports updates to the following files:

• build.gradle, build.gradle.kts (for Kotlin projects)
• gradle/libs.versions.toml (for projects using a standard Gradle version catalog)
• Files included via the apply declaration that have dependencies in the filename. Note that apply does not support apply to, recursion, or advanced syntaxes (for example, Kotlin's apply with mapOf, filenames defined by property).

Dependabot uses information from the pom.xml file of dependencies to add links to release information in update pull requests. If the information is omitted from the pom.xml file, then it cannot be included in Dependabot pull requests, see "Optimizing Java packages for Dependabot updates".

Maven

Dependabot doesn't run Maven but supports updates to pom.xml files.

Dependabot uses information from the pom.xml file of dependencies to add links to release information in update pull requests. If the information is omitted from the pom.xml file, then it cannot be included in Dependabot pull requests, see "Optimizing Java packages for Dependabot updates".

NuGet CLI

Dependabot doesn't run the NuGet CLI but does support most features up until version 4.8.

pip and pip-compile

In addition to supporting updates to requirements.txt files, Dependabot supports updates to pyproject.toml files if they follow the PEP 621 standard.

pnpm

pnpm is supported for Dependabot version updates (on v7, v8, and v9) and Dependabot security updates (on v7 and v8 only).

pub

Dependabot won't perform an update for pub when the version that it tries to update to is ignored, even if an earlier version is available.

Terraform

Terraform support includes:

• Modules hosted on Terraform Registry or a publicly reachable Git repository.
• Terraform providers.
• Private Terraform Registry. You can configure access for private git repositories by specifying a git registry in your dependabot.yml file. For more information, see git.

yarn

Dependabot supports vendored dependencies for v2 onwards.