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:

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

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

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

*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.

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

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

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.

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.

• 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.

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.

• 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.

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

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

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

This project is released under the MIT License.