Configuring Dependabot on GitHub-hosted runners

Enable Dependabot on GitHub-hosted runners to more easily identify Dependabot job errors and manually detect and troubleshoot failed runs.

Who can use this feature?

Organization owners and repository administrators

In this article

Enabling or disabling Dependabot on standard GitHub-hosted runners

You can configure Dependabot on standard GitHub-hosted runners:

If you restrict access to your organization's or repository's private resources, you may need to update your list of allowed IP addresses prior to enabling Dependabot on GitHub Actions runners. You can update your IP allow list to use the GitHub-hosted runners IP addresses (instead of the Dependabot IP addresses), sourced from the meta REST API endpoint.

Warning

You should not rely on the GitHub Actions IP addresses for authentication to private registries. These GitHub Actions addresses are not only used by GitHub, and should not be trusted for authentication. Instead, use a self-hosted runner to ensure greater control over your network access. For more information, see Configuring Dependabot on self-hosted runners.

For your repository

  1. On GitHub, navigate to the main page of the repository.

  2. Under your repository name, click Settings. If you cannot see the "Settings" tab, select the dropdown menu, then click Settings.

    Screenshot of a repository header showing the tabs. The "Settings" tab is highlighted by a dark orange outline.

  3. In the "Security" section of the sidebar, click Advanced Security.

  4. Under "Dependabot", to the right of "Dependabot on Actions runners", click Enable to enable the feature or Disable to disable it.

    Note

    Dependabot on GitHub Actions relies on the ubuntu-latest label to select the appropriate runner. To ensure Dependabot runs on GitHub-hosted runners, you should not use the label ubuntu-latest for self-hosted runners.

For your organization

Only repositories meeting the following criteria will be updated to run Dependabot on GitHub Actions the next time a Dependabot job is triggered.

  • Dependabot is enabled in the repository.
  • GitHub Actions is enabled in the repository.

If a repository in your organization has Dependabot enabled but GitHub Actions disabled, Dependabot will not run on GitHub Actions, but will continue to run using the built-in Dependabot application.

  1. In the upper-right corner of GitHub, click your profile picture, then click Organizations.

  2. Next to the organization, click Settings.

  3. In the "Security" section of the sidebar, click Advanced Security then Global settings.

  4. In the "Dependabot" section, next to "Runner type", confirm that you have selected "Standard GitHub runner". If not, click and update your configuration.

    Note

    Dependabot on GitHub Actions relies on the ubuntu-latest label to select the appropriate runner. To ensure Dependabot runs on GitHub-hosted runners, you should not use the label ubuntu-latest for self-hosted runners.

Enabling or disabling Dependabot on larger runners

If you run into Dependabot timeouts and out-of-memory errors, you may want to use larger runners, as you can configure these runners to have more resources. You can only enable larger runners for Dependabot for an organization.

  1. Add a larger runner to your organization and ensure the name specified is dependabot. For more information, see Managing larger runners.

  2. Opt in the organization to self-hosted runners. For more information, see Configuring Dependabot on self-hosted runners. This step is required, as it ensures that future Dependabot jobs will run on the larger GitHub-hosted runner that has the dependabot name.

    Note

    Dependabot on GitHub Actions relies on the ubuntu-latest label to select the appropriate runner. To ensure Dependabot runs on GitHub-hosted runners, you should not use the label ubuntu-latest for self-hosted runners.