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by gazereth 457 days ago
Pinning dependencies is trading one problem for another.

Yes, your builds will work as expected for a stretch of time, but that period will come to an end, eventually.

Then one day you will be forced to update those pinned dependencies and you might find yourself having to upgrade through several major versions, with breaking changes and knock-on effects to the rest of your pipelines.

Allowing rolling updates to dependencies helps keep these maintenance tasks small and manageable across the lifetime of the software.
3 comments
StrLght 457 days ago
You don’t have to update them manually. Renovate supports pinned GitHub Actions dependencies [1]. Unfortunately, I don’t use Dependabot so can’t say whether it does the same.

Just make sure you don’t leak secrets to your PRs. Also I usually review changes in updated actions before merging them. It doesn’t take that much time, so far I’ve been perfectly fine with doing that.

[1]: https://docs.renovatebot.com/modules/manager/github-actions/...

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chuckadams 457 days ago
Dependabot does support pinned hashes, even adds the comment after them with the tag. Dependabot fatigue is a thing though, and blindly mashing "merge" doesn't do much for your security, but at least there's some delay between a compromise and your workflow being updated to include it.
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baq 457 days ago
Not pinning dependencies is an existential risk to the business. Yes it’s a tradeoff, you must assign a probability of any dependency being hijacked in your timeframe yourself, but it is not zero.
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tasuki 457 days ago
I don't think others were necessarily talking about "business".

Though, yes, I prefer pinning dependencies for my personal projects. I don't see why things should break when I explicitly keep them the same.

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kevincox 457 days ago
That isn't even the biggest problem. That breaks, and breakage gets fixed. Other than some slight internal delays there is little harm done. (You have a backup emergency deploy process that doesn't depend on GitHub anyways right?)

The real problem is security vulnerabilities in these pinned dependencies. You end up making a choice between:

1. Pin and risk a malicious update.

2. Don't pin and have your dependencies get out of date and grow known security vulnerabilities.

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