Automatically keep tracks of outdated gems in a Github Issue

Long story short, in my organization, I'm responsible for upgrading our Rails application. First thing I checked was every gems that could be updated right away.

I quickly found the outdated command from bundler.

I ran it with the options --only-explicit --strict to check what is explicitly specified in my Gemfile and for what I can simply do bundle update <<gem> without changing the requested version in my Gemfile.

Without much of a surprise, we had more than 70 gems that could be updated right away.

To prevent being in a similar situation in a few months or years, I had the idea to run the 'bundle outdated' command automatically, so I can keep track of new gem release. My solution was to create a script that can run in a Github Action to keep a Github Issue updated with the list of all outdated gems and their newer versions. So now I can easily see many dependencies that can be updated.

How it works

You need to create a Github Action, it can be done by creating a .yml file under .github/workflows in your project. You will also need a Github private access token with the scope repo to be able to update the relative Github Issue. You can use the example in the README of the project.

In the example, the action runs on every push on master, which is convenient in a very active project and to have a live update of the issue if you merged an update. You can also choose to use a cron rule, which can be useful with a less active project.

When the action runs it will,

• Setup a Ruby environment with the version you specified in the .yml file
• Pull the script
• Download the Gemfile and Gemfile.lock files from your project
• Run the command bundle outdated --only-explicit --strict
• Create or update the description of the associated issue

Bhacaz / bundler-outdated-action

Script to use in a Github Actions to list in a issue the outdated gems

bundler-outdated-action

Use Github Actions to create and update a Github issue with the gems in your project that can be updated.

The result look like this:

---

Outdated gems (4)

bundle outdated --strict

Gem	Current	Newest	Groups
byebug	11.1.1	11.1.3	development, test
figaro	1.1.1	1.2.0	default
sidekiq	6.0.6	6.0.7	default
web-console	4.0.1	4.0.2	development

---

To use

1. Create a new workflows in your project (.github/workflows/outdated_gems.yml)
2. Create a Personal access tokens with the scope repo
3. Add the token in the secrets of your repository with the name GH_TOKEN

Example:

name: 'Outdated Gems'
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - master

jobs:
  outdated_gems:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    name: Outdated gems
    steps:
      - name: Checkout repo
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: Setup Ruby
        uses: ruby/setup-ruby@v1
      - name: 'Pull outdated gem action script'
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          repository: 'Bhacaz/bundler-outdated-action

…

View on GitHub

Happy updating