Allison explains GitHub’s transition to cursor-based pagination for Dependabot alerts REST API endpoints, highlighting changes and implications for developers working with supply chain security.

Dependabot Alerts API Deprecates Offset-Based Pagination

GitHub has removed support for offset-based pagination parameters (page, first, last) in all GitHub Dependabot alerts REST API endpoints. Going forward, only cursor-based parameters (before, after, per_page) are supported when querying for Dependabot alerts.

What’s Changing

Offset-based parameters: page, first, and last are no longer accepted when listing Dependabot alerts.
Cursor-based pagination: Use before, after, and per_page instead for all relevant endpoints.
Affected endpoints:
- List Dependabot alerts for a repository
- List Dependabot alerts for an organization
- List Dependabot alerts for an enterprise

Why This Change Was Made

Moving to cursor-based pagination brings Dependabot alerts in line with other GitHub security APIs, providing more reliable and performant data retrieval, especially for large datasets and enterprise integrations. Cursor-based paging avoids issues like data drift and inconsistent results common with offset-based approaches.

How to Use Cursor-Based Pagination

before: Fetches results that come before a specific cursor.
after: Fetches results that come after a specific cursor.
per_page: Sets the maximum number of items per page.

For full usage examples, see the following documentation:

Developer Impact

Update existing integrations to use the supported pagination parameters.
Review and test endpoints for compatibility.
Aligns with best practices for supply chain security and API consistency.

Authored by Allison; this update originally appeared on The GitHub Blog.

This post appeared first on “The GitHub Blog”. Read the entire article here