Pin GitHub Actions to full-length commit SHAs

[Dan Fiedler (danfiedler-msft)]

Summary

This PR pins GitHub Actions to full-length commit SHAs for improved security and reproducibility and adds a 7 day cooldown to Dependabot configuration for GitHub Actions. This work is described in more detail at https://aka.ms/action-pinning.

Why?

Pinning actions to commit SHAs prevents supply-chain attacks where a tag could be moved to point to malicious code. This is a recommended security best practice per the GitHub Actions security hardening guide.

This change mitigates the risk of tag retargeting to malicious code as seen in incidents like the tj-actions/changed-files action compromise or codfish/semantic-release-action compromise and improves the integrity and reproducibility of the CI/CD pipeline.

What changed?

Action pinning: Third-party action references in .github/workflows/ that used mutable tag-based references (e.g., actions/checkout@v4) have been updated to full-length commit SHAs with a version comment (e.g., actions/checkout@<sha> # v4) using the pinact tool. References that were already pinned to a SHA, or that used immutable release tags, were left unchanged.

Dependabot configuration: .github/dependabot.yml has been updated to ensure a github-actions package-ecosystem section is present with a cooldown configuration (default-days: 7). This groups Dependabot PRs for GitHub Actions and enforces a minimum 7-day cooldown between updates. If the file did not exist, it was created. If a github-actions section already existed, only the cooldown block was added or its default-days value was increased to 7 if it was lower. The 7-day cooldown provides a window for the community to detect and report compromised releases before they are automatically proposed as updates, reducing exposure to supply-chain attacks via newly published malicious versions.

Is this safe to merge?

Yes. The pinned SHAs correspond to the same commits that the existing tags pointed to. No behavioral changes are introduced. You can verify the pinned SHA value using the GitHub REST API (e.g., the commit hash for actions/checkout@v7 can be found in the sha property in the JSON response for GET https://api.github.com/repos/actions/checkout/commits/v7).

Additional Information

For more information, please see https://aka.ms/action-pinning

[github-actions]

check-spelling-bot Report

🔴 Please review

See the 📂 files view, the 📜action log, or 📝 job summary for details.

Unrecognized words (1)

cooldown

These words are not needed and should be removed

Abi Cred iid NBLGGH NNS winrtact

To accept these unrecognized words as correct and remove the previously acknowledged and now absent words, you could run the following commands

... in a clone of the git@github.com:danfiedler-msft/winget-studio.git repository
on the danfiedler/pin-actions branch (ℹ️ how do I use this?):

curl -s -S -L 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/check-spelling/check-spelling/v0.0.26/apply.pl' |
perl - 'https://github.com/microsoft/winget-studio/actions/runs/31631365538/attempts/1' &&
git commit -m 'Update check-spelling metadata'

Pattern suggestions ✂️ (1)

You could add these patterns to .github/actions/spelling/patterns.txt:

# Automatically suggested patterns

# hit-count: 1 file-count: 1
# curl arguments
\b(?:\\n|)curl(?:\.exe|)(?:\s+-[a-zA-Z]{1,2}\b)*(?:\s+-[a-zA-Z]{3,})(?:\s+-[a-zA-Z]+)*

Alternatively, if a pattern suggestion doesn't make sense for this project, add a # to the beginning of the line in the candidates file with the pattern to stop suggesting it.

Notices ℹ️ (1)

See the 📂 files view, the 📜action log, or 📝 job summary for details.

ℹ️ Notices	Count
ℹ️ candidate-pattern	1

See ℹ️ Event descriptions for more information.

If the flagged items are 🤯 false positives

If items relate to a ...

• binary file (or some other file you wouldn't want to check at all).

  Please add a file path to the excludes.txt file matching the containing file.

  File paths are Perl 5 Regular Expressions - you can test
  yours before committing to verify it will match your files.

  ^ refers to the file's path from the root of the repository, so ^README\.md$
  would exclude README.md (on whichever branch you're using).

• well-formed pattern.

  If you can write a pattern that would match it, try adding it to the patterns.txt file.

  Patterns are Perl 5 Regular Expressions - you can test
  yours before committing to verify it will match your lines.

  Note that patterns can't match multiline strings.