Keeping repository dependencies up to date is crucial to ensure quality and security. Outdated dependencies can expose the project to vulnerabilities, compromise its stability, and affect overall performance. To address this situation, GitHub has created a new tool called GitHub Action: Evergreen.
Managing dependencies poses a continuous challenge for developers due to constant library, framework, and package updates. Manual updates are laborious and prone to errors, and monitoring each dependency in all repositories is a daunting task.
Dependabot, a GitHub tool, automates dependency updates by creating pull requests for new versions. Unlike Dependabot versions focused on security, such as “Dependabot alerts” and “Dependabot security updates,” Dependabot version updates target any outdated dependency, without waiting for vulnerabilities to exist. This reduces developers’ workload and ensures projects use secure and recent versions of their dependencies.
However, configuring Dependabot through YAML files in each repository may complicate its centralized implementation, leading to inconsistent dependency management across projects. In response to this issue, GitHub has developed Evergreen.
GitHub’s Open Source Program Office (OSPO) aimed to streamline the implementation of Dependabot version updates in all organizations. This led to the creation of Evergreen, a GitHub action that serves as a dependency management assistant. Evergreen takes care of enabling and configuring Dependabot version updates uniformly across all repositories.
Evergreen has enabled GitHub to identify hundreds of private repositories to activate Dependabot, ensuring continuous updates and keeping repositories up to date. This process ensures dependencies are always up to date without additional effort for developers.
Evergreen’s operation is simple yet effective. Upon activation, it checks if Dependabot version updates are enabled in all organization repositories. If not, Evergreen automatically enables and configures it, opening pull requests for change review.
To activate Evergreen, it can be configured like any other GitHub Action to run on a set schedule or manually activated. The tool then verifies Dependabot’s configuration, and if not enabled, it configures it automatically and opens a pull request for review and approval of the configuration.
In conclusion, maintaining updated dependencies is essential for project quality and security. Dependabot facilitates this task, and Evergreen ensures consistent implementation across all repositories. With Evergreen, dependencies are always up to date. For more information, visit the Evergreen repository on GitHub.
via: MiMub in Spanish
