Catching up dependencies updates

Question

Staying on top of new versions

Before jumping into the topic, I'd like to make you this provocative question: Are you sure your side projects, perhaps your SaaS, or maybe on your work, have the updated dependencies? Have you ever considered this important?

I believe you have. But if not, think for a moment.

It's not only important, is vital for both developers and product. But managing it it's hard. It's impossible to do it manually.

As a software developer myself, I completely understand the complexity, how hard it is staying on top on new versions and dependencies.

So here I have a quick, simple and clean way of achieving it.

Simply enable dependabot updates

Yes, you get it right. As simple as that. Usually once a weekly it's great for most projects, but you can use a longer or a shorter period.

By enabling dependabot you'll get PRs created automagically everytime a dependency gets bumped to a new version. It works for GitHub Actions too!

Note that this requires your repository to be on GitHub. I'm not familiar with Gitlab, Bitbucket or other environments.

That's it! Go for it!

Comments

Great advice! Adding more in-depth explanations along with clear H1 and H2 headings would really help readers understand why staying updated is so important and how Dependabot works under the hood. What challenges have you faced managing dependency updates in larger projects?