Fixing Slow Dependabot Actions in Go Projects
Dependabot actions for Golang projects on GitHub experienced significant slowdowns between April 24th and 27th, 2026. A workaround was identified that involves adding a specific environment file to restore previous build times. This fix is effective as of June 2026, but future changes to Dependabot or GitHub may affect its performance.
- ▪Dependabot actions for Golang projects took over 15 minutes instead of the usual 1 minute during a specific timeframe in April 2026.
- ▪Adding a go.env file with the correct configuration can restore the faster build times for Dependabot jobs.
- ▪The slowdown was linked to a change in the job definition that affected how dependencies were resolved.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
I’ll go into a much longer explanation below, but first I’ll give a quick summary and not bury the fix.Sometime between April 24th and 27th, 2026, Github Actions workflow jobs for Dependabot started taking over 15 minutes in two of our Golang projects, compared to the 1 minute they took before. If you look at your past workflow logs around this same timeframe, you may see something similar to this. Notice the jump from 56 seconds, to 13 minutes 23 seconds:The Quick FixThis fix (workaround?) does the job as of June 2026 — your mileage may vary in the future as Dependabot or Github’s harness for it continues to change.To get the build times back down for both the “Dependency Graph” and “Dependabot Updates” jobs, add a go.env file similar to below to the same directory as your go.mod and…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Clarityboss.
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