actions/dependency-submission

The dependency-submission action

Generates and submits a dependency graph for a Gradle project. This action is designed to be used in a standalone workflow. The intention is to provide a simple, standardised way to enable Dependency Graph support for Gradle repositories, with a long-term goal of having this functionality enabled by default for Gradle projects on GitHub.

General usage

The following workflow will generate a dependency graph for a Gradle project and submit it immediately to the repository via the Dependency Submission API. For most projects, this default configuration should be all that you need.

Simply add this as a new workflow file to your repository (eg .github/workflows/dependency-submission.yml).

name: Dependency Submission

on: [ push ]

permissions:
  contents: write

jobs:
  dependency-submission:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - name: Checkout sources
      uses: actions/checkout@v4
    - name: Generate and submit dependency graph
      uses: gradle/actions/dependency-submission@v3-beta

Configuration parameters

In some cases, the default action configuration will not be sufficient, and additional action parameters will need to be specified.

See the example below for a summary, and the Action Metadata file for a more detailed description of each input parameter.

name: Dependency Submission with advanced config

on: [ push ]

permissions:
  contents: read

jobs:
  dependency-submission:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - name: Checkout sources
      uses: actions/checkout@v4
    - name: Generate and save dependency graph
      uses: gradle/actions/dependency-submission@v3-beta
      with:
        # Use a particular Gradle version instead of the configured wrapper.
        gradle-version: 8.6-rc-2

        # The gradle project is not in the root of the repository.
        build-root-directory: my-gradle-project

        # Enable configuration-cache reuse for this build.
        cache-encryption-key: ${{ secrets.GRADLE_ENCRYPTION_KEY }}

        # Do not attempt to submit the dependency-graph. Save it as a workflow artifact.
        dependency-graph-action: generate-and-save

Integrating the dependency-review-action

The GitHub dependency-review-action helps you understand dependency changes (and the security impact of these changes) for a pull request, by comparing the dependency graph for the pull-request with that of the HEAD commit.

Example of a pull request workflow that executes a build for a pull request and runs the dependency-review-action:

name: Dependency review for pull requests

on: [ pull_request ]

permissions:
  contents: write

jobs:
  dependency-submission:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - name: Checkout sources
      uses: actions/checkout@v4
    - name: Generate and submit dependency graph
      uses: gradle/actions/dependency-submission@v3-beta
  
  dependency-review:
    needs: dependency-submission
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - name: Perform dependency review
      uses: actions/dependency-review-action@v3

Note that the dependency-submission action submits the dependency graph at the completion of the workflow Job. For this reason, the dependency-review-action must be executed in a dependent job, and not as a subsequent step in the job that generates the dependency graph.

Usage with pull requests from public forked repositories

This contents: write permission is not available for any workflow that is triggered by a pull request submitted from a public forked repository. This limitation is designed to prevent a malicious pull request from effecting repository changes.

Because of this restriction, we require 2 separate workflows in order to generate and submit a dependency graph:

1. The first workflow runs directly against the pull request sources and will generate-and-save the dependency graph.
2. The second workflow is triggered on workflow_run of the first workflow, and will retrieve-and-submit the previously saved dependency graph.

Main workflow file

name: Generate and save dependency graph

on: [ pull_request ]

permissions:
  contents: read # 'write' permission is not available

jobs:
  dependency-submission:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - name: Checkout sources
      uses: actions/checkout@v4
    - name: Generate and submit dependency graph
      uses: gradle/actions/dependency-submission@v3-beta
      with:
        dependency-graph-action: generate-and-save

Dependent workflow file

name: Retrieve and submit dependency graph

on:
  workflow_run:
    workflows: ['Generate and save dependency graph']
    types: [completed]

permissions:
  contents: write

jobs:
  submit-dependency-graph:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - name: Retrieve and submit dependency graph
      uses: gradle/actions/dependency-submission@v3-beta
      with:
        dependency-graph-action: retrieve-and-submit # Download saved dependency-graph and submit

Integrating dependency-review-action for pull requests from public forked repositories

To integrate the dependency-review-action into the pull request workflows above, a third workflow file is required. This workflow will be triggered directly on pull_request, but will wait until the dependency graph results are submitted before the dependency review can complete. The period to wait is controlled by the retry-on-snapshot-warnings input parameters.

Here's an example of a separate "Dependency Review" workflow that will wait for 10 minutes for the above PR check workflow to complete.

name: dependency-review

on: [ pull_request ]

permissions:
  contents: read

jobs:
  dependency-review:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - name: 'Dependency Review'
      uses: actions/dependency-review-action@v3
      with:
        retry-on-snapshot-warnings: true
        retry-on-snapshot-warnings-timeout: 600

The retry-on-snapshot-warnings-timeout (in seconds) needs to be long enough to allow the entire Generate and save dependency graph and Retrieve and submit dependency graph workflows (above) to complete.

Gradle version compatibility

Dependency-graph generation is compatible with most versions of Gradle >= 5.2, and is tested regularly against Gradle versions 5.2.1, 5.6.4, 6.0.1, 6.9.4, 7.1.1 and 7.6.3, as well as all patched versions of Gradle 8.x.

A known exception to this is that Gradle 7.0, 7.0.1 and 7.0.2 are not supported.