---
id: "automatically-approving-and-merging-dependabot-pull-requests"
title: "Automatically Approving and Merging Dependabot Pull Requests"
description: "A simple GitHub workflow to automatically approve and merge
  Dependabot pull requests."
pubDate: "2022-05-12T00:00:00.000Z"
tags:
  - "code"
  - "GitHub"
  - "dependabot"
  - "snippet"
  - "workflows"
  - "automation"
syndicate: false
canonicalURL: "https://justin.poehnelt.com/posts/automatically-approving-and-me\
  rging-dependabot-pull-requests/"
relativeURL: "/posts/automatically-approving-and-merging-dependabot-pull-requests/"
markdownURL: "/posts/automatically-approving-and-merging-dependabot-pull-requests.md"
---
I’ve recently been using a combination of GitHub apps to automate the approval and merging of Dependabot pull requests, but wanted to simplify this into a GitHub workflow, using branch protection and GitHub’s auto merge feature.

The GitHub workflow looks something like:

```yaml
name: Dependabot
on: pull_request

permissions:
  contents: write

jobs:
  dependabot:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    if: ${{ github.actor == 'dependabot[bot]' }}
    env:
      PR_URL: ${{github.event.pull_request.html_url}}
      GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN}} # I use a PA token.
    steps:
      - name: approve
        run: gh pr review --approve "$PR_URL"
      - name: merge
        run: gh pr merge --auto --squash --delete-branch "$PR_URL"
```

❗ **Warning**: I wouldn’t implement this without branch protection and required status checks.

And it works! 🎉

The pull request now looks like the following:

[![Automating DependaBot pull request approval and merging](https://justin.poehnelt.com/images/automating-dependabot-pull-requests.png)](https://justin.poehnelt.com/images/automating-dependabot-pull-requests.png)

Automating DependaBot pull request approval and merging

Once I had this implemented and pushed to all the repositories, I just need to [tell Dependabot to rebase all pull requests](https://justin.poehnelt.com/posts/rebase-all-dependabot-pull-requests/).

It would be fairly easy to add a check for labels on the pull request, and only `gh approve` if the label was present, but I really didn’t have a use case for this right now because I feel confident in the required status checks.


[Automatically Approving and Merging Dependabot Pull Requests](https://justin.poehnelt.com/posts/automatically-approving-and-merging-dependabot-pull-requests/) © 2022 by [Justin Poehnelt](https://justin.poehnelt.com/) is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

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