Pin GitHub Actions to full-length commit SHAs#1547
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Pull request overview
This PR hardens the repository’s CI/CD supply chain by pinning third-party GitHub Actions in workflows to immutable full-length commit SHAs (with version comments), and adds a Dependabot configuration to manage GitHub Actions updates with a 7-day cooldown.
Changes:
- Pinned
actions/checkout,actions/setup-node,JS-DevTools/npm-publish,peter-evans/create-pull-request, andalexweininger/bump-prerelease-versionto full commit SHAs across affected workflows. - Added
.github/dependabot.ymlfor thegithub-actionsecosystem with grouping and a weekly schedule plus acooldownof 7 days.
Reviewed changes
Copilot reviewed 5 out of 5 changed files in this pull request and generated no comments.
Show a summary per file
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| .github/workflows/feature-request.yml | Pins actions/checkout to a full commit SHA for the feature request workflow. |
| .github/workflows/bump-version-pr.yaml | Pins checkout and two third-party actions used to bump version and create PRs. |
| .github/workflows/api-publish.yaml | Pins checkout, setup-node, and npm-publish actions used for publishing. |
| .github/workflows/api-extractor.yaml | Pins checkout and setup-node actions used for API extraction CI. |
| .github/dependabot.yml | Adds Dependabot configuration for GitHub Actions with grouping, weekly cadence, and 7-day cooldown. |
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Don't think we've ever used this, so honestly we could delete it.
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This didn't work and should probably be deleted.
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Can't do direct NPM publishing like this, so definitely needs deleted.
Summary
This PR pins GitHub Actions to full-length commit SHAs for improved security and reproducibility and adds a 7 day cooldown to Dependabot configuration for GitHub Actions.
Why?
Pinning actions to commit SHAs prevents supply-chain attacks where a tag could be moved to point to malicious code. This is a recommended security best practice per the GitHub Actions security hardening guide.
This change mitigates the risk of tag retargeting to malicious code as seen in incidents like the tj-actions/changed-files action compromise or codfish/semantic-release-action compromise and improves the integrity and reproducibility of the CI/CD pipeline.
What changed?
Action pinning: Third-party action references in
.github/workflows/that used mutable tag-based references (e.g.,actions/checkout@v4) have been updated to full-length commit SHAs with a version comment (e.g.,actions/checkout@<sha> # v4) using the pinact tool. References that were already pinned to a SHA, or that used immutable release tags, were left unchanged.Dependabot configuration:
.github/dependabot.ymlhas been updated to ensure agithub-actionspackage-ecosystem section is present with acooldownconfiguration (default-days: 7). This groups Dependabot PRs for GitHub Actions and enforces a minimum 7-day cooldown between updates. If the file did not exist, it was created. If agithub-actionssection already existed, only thecooldownblock was added or itsdefault-daysvalue was increased to 7 if it was lower. The 7-day cooldown provides a window for the community to detect and report compromised releases before they are automatically proposed as updates, reducing exposure to supply-chain attacks via newly published malicious versions.Is this safe to merge?
Yes. The pinned SHAs correspond to the same commits that the existing tags pointed to. No behavioral changes are introduced. You can verify the pinned SHA value using the GitHub REST API (e.g., the commit hash for
actions/checkout@v7can be found in theshaproperty in the JSON response forGET https://api.github.com/repos/actions/checkout/commits/v7).For more information, visit https://aka.ms/action-pinning