dependency-review-action

dependency-review-action

Overview

The dependency review 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:

Public repositories
Private repositories with a GitHub Advanced Security license.

Viewing the results

When the action runs, you can see the results on:

The job logs page.
1. Go to the Actions tab for the repository and select the relevant workflow run.
2. Then under “Jobs”, click dependency review.
The job summary page.
1. Go to the Actions tab for the repository and select the relevant workflow run.
2. Click Summary, then scroll to “dependency-review summary”.

Installation (standard)

You can install the action on any public repository, or any organization-owned private repository, provided the organization has a GitHub Advanced Security license.

Note: Dependency Review Action v5.0.0 updates the runtime to node24. This requires a minimum Actions Runner version v2.327.1 to run.

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@v6
      - name: 'Dependency Review'
        uses: actions/dependency-review-action@v5

Installation (GitHub Enterprise Server)

You can install the action on repositories on GitHub Enterprise Server.

Ensure GitHub Advanced Security and GitHub Connect are enabled for the enterprise.
Ensure you have installed the dependency-review-action on the server.

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

name: 'Dependency Review'
on: [pull_request]

permissions:
  contents: read

jobs:
  dependency-review:
    runs-on: self-hosted
    steps:
      - name: 'Checkout Repository'
        uses: actions/checkout@v6
      - name: 'Dependency Review'
        uses: actions/dependency-review-action@v5

In the workflow file, replace the runs-on value with the label of any of your runners. (The default value is self-hosted.)

Configuration

Configuration options
Configuration methods

Configuration options

There are various configuration options you can use to specify settings for the dependency review action.

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`*	⚠️ This option is deprecated for possible removal in the next major release. See Deprecate the deny-licenses option #938 for more information. 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. With each execution, a new comment will overwrite the existing one.	`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`	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
`show-patched-versions`*	When set to `true`, the vulnerability summary table will include an additional column showing the first patched version for each vulnerability. This requires additional API calls to fetch advisory data.	`true`, `false`	`false`

[!NOTE]

* Not supported for use with GitHub Enterprise Server. (Checking for licenses is not supported on GitHub Enterprise Server because the API does not return license information.)

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

The allow-licenses and deny-licenses options are mutually exclusive; an error will be raised if you provide both.

If we can’t detect the license for a dependency we will inform you, but the action won’t fail.

Configuration methods

To specify settings for the dependency review action, you can choose from two options:

Option 1: Inline the configuration options in your workflow file.
Option 2: Reference an external configuration file in your workflow file.

Option 1: Using inline configuration

You can pass configuration options to the dependency review action using your workflow file.

In the same YAML workflow file you created during installation, use the with: key to specify your chosen settings:

name: 'Dependency Review'
on: [pull_request]
permissions:
  contents: read
jobs:
  dependency-review:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: 'Checkout Repository'
        uses: actions/checkout@v6
      - name: Dependency Review
        uses: actions/dependency-review-action@v5
        with:
          fail-on-severity: moderate

          # Use comma-separated names to pass list arguments:
          deny-licenses: LGPL-2.0, BSD-2-Clause
          allow-dependencies-licenses: "pkg:npm/@myorg/mypackage, pkg:npm/packagename, pkg:githubactions/owner/repo@2.0.0"

Option 2: Using an external configuration file

You can use an external configuration file to specify settings for this action. The file can be a local file or a file in an external repository.

In the same YAML workflow file you created during installation, use config-file to specify that you are using an external configuration file.

name: 'Dependency Review'
on: [pull_request]
permissions:
  contents: read
jobs:
  dependency-review:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: 'Checkout Repository'
        uses: actions/checkout@v6
      - name: Dependency Review
        uses: actions/dependency-review-action@v5
        with:
          config-file: './.github/dependency-review-config.yml'

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`

Optionally, if the file resides in a private external repository, and for all GitHub Enterprise Server repositories, use external-repo-token to specify a token for fetching the file.

- name: Dependency Review
  uses: actions/dependency-review-action@v5
  with:
    config-file: 'github/octorepo/dependency-review-config.yml@main'
    external-repo-token: 'ghp_123456789abcde'

Option	Usage	Possible values
`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.

Create the configuration file in the path you specified for config-file.

In the configuration file, specify your chosen settings.

fail-on-severity: 'critical'
allow-licenses:
  - 'GPL-3.0'
  - 'BSD-3-Clause'
  - 'MIT'

`OTHER` in license strings

License data comes from ClearlyDefined and you may sometimes see licenses displayed with the string OTHER in them. ClearlyDefined defines OTHER as:

This indicates that a human confirmed that there is license information in the file but that the license is not an SPDX-identified license.

OTHER is not a valid SPDX license identifier, so we convert OTHER in a license string into LicenseRef-clearlydefined-OTHER, which is valid in SPDX. If you want to add that to the deny or allow list, be sure to add LicenseRef-clearlydefined-OTHER to this list, because that is what we’ll actually be comparing.

Further information

For more examples of how to use this action and its configuration options, see the examples page.
For general information about dependency review on GitHub, see “About dependency review“ in the GitHub Docs documentation.

Using dependency review action to block a pull request from being merged

You can configure your repository to block a pull request from being merged if the pull request fails the dependency review action check. To do this, the repository owner must configure branch protection settings that require the check to pass before merging. For more information, see “Require status checks before merging“ in GitHub Docs documentation.

Outputs

Dependency review action can create outputs, so that data from its execution can be used by other jobs in a workflow.

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.

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.