Support wildcard/glob patterns in directory config

[clxmstaab]

when working with the very popular Composer bin plugin to isolate your dependencies in a php and composer depenency manager context, the resulting file structure in your repo looks like

vendor-bin/
├── churn-php
│   ├── composer.json
│   ├── composer.lock
│   └── vendor
├── clx-active-record-fixer
│   ├── composer.json
│   ├── composer.lock
│   └── vendor
├── php-cs-fixer
│   ├── composer.json
│   ├── composer.lock
│   └── vendor
└── phpstan
    ├── composer.json
    ├── composer.lock
    └── vendor

this means for every dependency/tool I managed via the "Composer bin plugin" today, I need to configure a separate pattern in my dependabot.conf.

in our usual projects this looks like

version: 2
updates:
  -   package-ecosystem: composer
      directory: /
      schedule:
        interval: daily

  -   package-ecosystem: npm
      directory: /
      schedule:
        interval: daily

  -   package-ecosystem: composer
      directory: /vendor-bin/churn-php/
      versioning-strategy: increase
      schedule:
        interval: daily

  -   package-ecosystem: composer
      directory: /vendor-bin/clx-active-record-fixer/
      versioning-strategy: increase
      schedule:
        interval: daily

  -   package-ecosystem: composer
      directory: /vendor-bin/php-cs-fixer/
      versioning-strategy: increase
      schedule:
        interval: daily

  -   package-ecosystem: composer
      directory: /vendor-bin/phpstan/
      versioning-strategy: increase
      schedule:
        interval: daily

the number of entries grows with the number of dependencies managed via "Composer bin plugin".

things would get a lot easier if we could glob/wildcard patterns in the directory config. when glob/wildcard patterns would be supported our dependabot.conf could get simplified to

version: 2
updates:
  -   package-ecosystem: composer
      directory: /
      schedule:
        interval: daily

  -   package-ecosystem: npm
      directory: /
      schedule:
        interval: daily

  -   package-ecosystem: composer
      directory: /vendor-bin/*/
      versioning-strategy: increase
      schedule:
        interval: daily

see the directory: /vendor-bin/*/ line which would contain "all the magic".

[clxmstaab]

I guess my request is similar to https://github.com/dependabot/feedback/issues/911 but my use case is for php instead of javascript as in the mentioned issue.

[IEvangelist]

I too would like this feature, I was exploring the source code - looking to understand how this works. I noticed that allowing the directory to config option to support globbing would really make this much more powerful. Right now we have many repos that have to define an entry per directory, it would be much easier to specify a glob instead.

See #1952

[feelepxyz]

Closing as a duplicate of #2178

This isn't specific to the package manager and requires some deeper changes in the way dependabot fetches the repo contents to work. We've got some ideas around how this will also play into grouped updates.