Improving the developer experience for Dependabot alerts

At GitHub, we believe in providing developer-first experiences to help you keep your code secure. Since we launched Dependabot alerts nearly four years ago, we’ve alerted users on over 425 million potential vulnerabilities in their open source dependencies. Today, we’re rolling out improvements to Dependabot alerts that make them easier to understand and remediate.

What’s new

More descriptive Dependabot alerts

We’ve made it easier to quickly assess, prioritize, and act on Dependabot alerts.

Starting today, Dependabot alerts are now displayed with one alert per advisory and dependency manifest, rather than being grouped by package.

With this change, Dependabot alerts can now surface more useful information about each vulnerability—for example, alerts will include more descriptive alert titles, detailed breakdowns on alert severity scoring, and updated information about linked pull requests.

Dependabot alerts across your repositories now have improved searching and tracking. Each alert now has a unique numeric identifier, which will soon also be available via the GraphQL API. The alert index page has been redesigned with new filtering options that make it easier to search, including a new search filter field with full-text search of alerts.

Improvements to the alert lifecycle

As we improve how alerts are viewed, we also have invested in how alerts are managed throughout their lifecycle.

As of today, Dependabot alerts will now persist and continue to appear under the “Closed” tab in the UI after they’re fixed. Later this month, they’ll also be available via the GraphQL API. As a follow-up to this release, we’ll also be shipping the ability to reopen dismissed alerts.

Finally, starting today, GitHub Advanced Security customers can now view all their organization-level Dependabot alerts in the “Organization Security” tab. This view is available to organization owners and members of teams with the security manager role. Of course, repository-level Dependabot alerts and PRs will remain free forever. 💖

What’s next

Driven by your feedback, these changes are the first step towards improving Dependabot alerts. We’re continuing to work on addressing your top concerns and feedback for Dependabot, including better APIs, noise filtering, actionability, and configurability of alerts, and more.

Keep an eye on the public roadmap for information on upcoming releases, and let us know what you think about Dependabot.

Learn more about Dependabot alerts, or read more about our other security features.

Written by

Erin Havens

@erinhav

Erin Havens is a Product Manager at GitHub, focused on security products. 100+ ships across products like Secret Protection and Dependabot (and counting).