No longer possible to add reviewers to only Dependabot PRs, with the retirement of reviewers configuration option

[petervdv]

Select Topic Area

Product Feedback

Body

It seems with the retirement of the Dependabot reviewers configuration option, and having to use a CODEOWNERS file, it's no longer possible to assign a person to specifically Dependabot PR's. Or I'm missing something.

The best thing that I can come up with, is assigning someone to changes to the Gemfile.lock file, but then of course that person will also be assigned if that file is changed in any other PR.

Do other people see a solution to this?

[github-actions[bot]]

💬 Your Product Feedback Has Been Submitted 🎉

Thank you for taking the time to share your insights with us! Your feedback is invaluable as we build a better GitHub experience for all our users.

Here's what you can expect moving forward ⏩

• Your input will be carefully reviewed and cataloged by members of our product teams. 
  • Due to the high volume of submissions, we may not always be able to provide individual responses.
  • Rest assured, your feedback will help chart our course for product improvements.
• Other users may engage with your post, sharing their own perspectives or experiences. 
• GitHub staff may reach out for further clarification or insight. 
  • We may 'Answer' your discussion if there is a current solution, workaround, or roadmap/changelog post related to the feedback.

Where to look to see what's shipping 👀

• Read the Changelog for real-time updates on the latest GitHub features, enhancements, and calls for feedback.
• Explore our Product Roadmap, which details upcoming major releases and initiatives.

What you can do in the meantime 💻

• Upvote and comment on other user feedback Discussions that resonate with you.
• Add more information at any point! Useful details include: use cases, relevant labels, desired outcomes, and any accompanying screenshots.

As a member of the GitHub community, your participation is essential. While we can't promise that every suggestion will be implemented, we want to emphasize that your feedback is instrumental in guiding our decisions and priorities.

Thank you once again for your contribution to making GitHub even better! We're grateful for your ongoing support and collaboration in shaping the future of our platform. ⭐

[smcgivern]

I agree with this. The changelog post says that they overlap, which is true, but the point of the Dependabot reviewers feature was specifically to stop Dependabot PRs going owner-less.

For now, we're trying out assignees instead, but it's a bit more annoying as the assignees field cannot use a team.

[justine-dorsz]

It also seems that assigning a random reviewer from a group to a Dependabot PR is no longer possible. Has anyone found a workaround for this?

[syphar]

was there anything clarified here?

In the blog article I can see that the date was set to May 20, which is already in the past, and the feature is still there.

With CODEOWNERS I don't see how we could assign all dependabot PRs to one team, while other teams can still make changes to (in our case) pyproject.toml and poetry.lock without needing a review by the one team.

[cbartlett]

I'm also dismayed by this change. The blog post states the functionality overlaps with CODEOWNERS but that's false: There is no way with CODEOWNERS to request review from specific people for only dependabot PRs.

[wverdese]

Just wanted to jump in and say this change has really made things harder for us. The old reviewers option for Dependabot PRs was super helpful, we could make sure automated PRs always got a proper review without spamming the team on every single PR.
When you switch to using CODEOWNERS, it’s no longer just about Dependabot PRs, it’s about ownership for the whole repo, which is a totally different concept.
I really hope you’ll consider bringing this feature back, or adding something similar for Dependabot PRs.

[TSenter]

Jumping in here as well - we're just now rolling out Dependabot to our repositories on a wider scale (GHES) and I was thinking about how neat it would be to have my team be requested to review Dependabot PRs. I saw that this feature was going away and was confused as well. Like others have said, CODEOWNERS are great if your repository represents the state of your production system - you don't want just anyone to modify certain files without specific users'/teams' approval. However, I don't want to have to review every PR that might mess with dependencies.

For us, it's not about limiting who can review changes to certain files but making sure the team that owns a repository is notified when these PRs are opened. It's all too easy to miss them, especially in projects that don't change often. I would love for the reviewers feature to stay/come back, especially since you can't add teams to assignees.

[cbartlett]

Sharing this back out here for anyone else who was affected by this change.

At StatusGator, we have solved this by adding a new GitHub action that requests reviews based on the tags that Dependabot automatically adds to PRs. Since it uses different tags for each package ecosystem, we can vary who gets requested on the review.

Here's a Gist with a sample action: https://gist.github.com/cbartlett/c550bee8584cd66d4422244593f50715