• dependency-review-action
  • Overview
    • Viewing the results
  • Installation
    • Installation (standard)
    • Installation (GitHub Enterprise Server)
  • Configuration
    • Configuration options
    • Configuration methods
      • Option 1: Using inline configuration
      • Option 2: Using an external configuration file
      • OTHER in license strings
      • Further information
  • Using dependency review action to block a pull request from being merged
  • Outputs
  • Getting help
  • Contributing
  • License

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.

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)
• Installation (GitHub Enterprise Server)

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.

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

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

1. Ensure GitHub Advanced Security and GitHub Connect are enabled for the enterprise.

2. Ensure you have installed the dependency-review-action on the server.

3. 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

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

• Configuration options
• Configuration methods

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

All configuration options are optional.

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.

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

1. 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"

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.

1. 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

2. 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.

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

4. In the configuration file, specify your chosen settings.

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

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.

• 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.

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.

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.

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.