How to automate dependabot updates generating a changeset

Affected Packages

cli/actions, etc.

Problem

I want to automate my dependency updates w/ dependabot, but I’ve realized I’m not generating changesets for each dep upgrade - I’d rather sort out a way to automate that, but I’m not sure how!

Proposed solution

My initial idea would be to have a github action that runs on push to main that looks for whether the commit is tagged w/ “dependabot” and then adds a changeset w/ the content of the commit message? ex: https://github.com/snowpackjs/prettier-plugin-astro/pull/14

[Andarist]

Ye, the proposed command sounds quite nice - we could add support for it. Although from the Changeset PoV a “changed” package (at least at the moment) is a one that had any files changed since the “base branch”. With Renovate bot and stuff you might only change devDependencies of a package and such a change most likely doesn’t deserve a changeset as it doesn’t affect the final consumer of your package.

So I’m unsure what’s the best strategy to handle this case - but we could start with a PR that would implement this using the current “changed” logic and bikeshed this with a PR already in place.

I won’t have time to work on this right now though so I would appreciate a PR from a community member who cares about this feature 😉 I will get to this eventually but it can take some time for me.

[Andarist]

Yes, this isn’t a thing - it could be possibly implemented, there was just never a need for this. Note that you would still have to know which packages you’d like to include a changeset (unless we would provide special flags like --include-all and --include-changed).

As the changeset files are just markdown files you can freely add them manually, no need to actually generate them through the CLI (it’s just a convenience tool in this regard). The generated filename also doesn’t matter - it is randomized.