[xign]

I don't think you should ever allow dependabot to make direct commits to the repository. The only sane setting (IMO) is that dependabot should just make PRs, and a human needs to verify that and hit merge. My personal opinion is for any serious repositories, allowing a robot to have commit access is often a bad time and ticking time bomb (security-wise).

Now, of course, if there are literally hundreds of dependencies to update every week, then a human isn't really going to go through each and make sure they look good, so that person just becomes a rubber-stamper, which doesn't help the situation. At that point the team should probably seriously evaluate if their tech stack is just utterly broken if they have that many dependencies.

[matsemann]

Even if you don't automerge, the bots will often have elevated rights (it needs to be able to see your private repository, for instance), so it making a PR will run your build jobs, possibly with the updated version, and just by doing that expose your secrets even without committing to main.