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npm's min-release-age property prevents dependabot from making PRs for recent security updates #15112

@nikolawork

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@nikolawork

Is there an existing issue for this?

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Package ecosystem

npm

Package manager version

npm ^11.10.0

Language version

Node ^24.14.1

Manifest location and content before the Dependabot update

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dependabot.yml content

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What you expected to see, versus what you actually saw

In .npmrc we have set min-release-age=14, which means we only install package versions that have been released at least 2 weeks ago.

I expect dependabot to ignore this settings for security updates (like it ignores cooldown for security updates) and make the update PR, instead I find this error in the Dependabot logs:

2026/05/20 11:22:07 ERROR <job_1376421738> Error running package manager command: corepack npm install ws@8.20.1 --package-lock-only --dry-run=true --ignore-scripts, Error: npm error code ETARGET
npm error notarget No matching version found for ws@8.20.1 with a date before 5/6/2026, 11:22:06 AM.

Native package manager behavior

If I currently run npm update ws --force --ignore-scripts --package-lock-only it will update to ws@8.20.0 because that version is older than 2 weeks.

But if I run npm update ws --force --ignore-scripts --package-lock-only --min-release-age=0 (note the added --min-release-age=0) it will update to the actual latest version: ws@8.20.1

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Smallest manifest that reproduces the issue

When it comes to security update PRs I think dependabot should ignore min-release-age (but please don't ignore it for regular update PRs). So instead of running:

npm update PACKAGE_NAME --force --ignore-scripts --package-lock-only

You can run this:

npm update PACKAGE_NAME --force --ignore-scripts --package-lock-only --min-release-age=0

This will tell npm to ignore the user's min-release-age and install the latest version.

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