Dependabot fails for latest changes to its config

Exercism Bugs & Feature Requests
1

Maintainers got a changed Dependabot config file pushed into their repos. That did not fail the tracks CI, but does fail when Dependabot wants to use it:

Dependabot couldn't parse the config file at .github/dependabot.yml

Dependabot couldn't parse the config file at .github/dependabot.yml. The error raised was:

(<unknown>): did not find expected alphabetic or numeric character while scanning an alias at line 13 column 13

Please ensure the config file is a valid YAML file. An online YAML linter is available here.

I’m not sure about how to fix it, as it was a mass PR, I think.

2

in which repo did this happen?

3

I’ve got it here: [dependabot] Manage Docker versions (#1058) · exercism/php@172621e · GitHub here: [dependabot] Manage Docker versions (#183) · exercism/php-test-runner@bbcc4f1 · GitHub and here: [dependabot] Manage Docker versions (#343) · exercism/php-representer@8b8c21c · GitHub in all PHP track repos. I suspect it happens in other repos, too.

4

The problem was unquoted asterisks, which are special YAML characters.

Attn: @IsaacG @BNAndras or other guardians

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5

Thanks, that worked. I mark it solved, but do not know about other repos that might be failing.

6

I didn’t notice other tracks using that particular dependabot.yml recipe. IsaacG can you have a quick grep please?

No, there are a few: Code search results

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