Neighbourhoodie says Goodbye to Greenkeeper: We’re partnering with Snyk to deliver Next Generation Dev Tool Automation posted Thursday, March 5, 2020 by The Neighbourhoodie Team

Berlin, March 5, 2020. Greenkeeper, the pioneering automated dependency update service, is closing doors on June 3rd, 2020. Neighbourhoodie Software, the makers of Greenkeeper, have partnered with developer security company Snyk.io to build the next generation automated dependency update service. All customers and open source users are provided a one-click migration to the new service under Snyk’s stewardship. Neighbourhoodie’s Greenkeeper developers have spent the past six months building out Snyk’s feature set with regards to automated dependency updates, implementing many of the top feature requests of existing Greenkeeper users.

The intention behind this partnership has two main reasons:

1. At Greenkeeper, we clearly see a trend in adoption of this type of service, and we see requirements for a flexible and highly configurable service that keeps up with multiple fast-paced development ecosystems.
2. 2019 saw a consolidation in the admittedly small market of automated dependency updates: GitHub under Microsoft acquired Greenkeeper competitor Dependabot while security company WhiteSource acquired Renovate.

As a consequence of both of these factors, we started looking for a strong partner to help us realise our vision for what an automated dependency service should look like and in Summer of 2019 we found Snyk.io.

Snyk provides Open Source security with a developer-first focus for over 400 000 developers. They care about automation, the developer workflow, and doing genuine good in the Open Source community while making it safer and more secure. We honestly couldn’t be more happy about this partnership: not only do we agree on how dependency updates should work, our two companies are also well aligned in terms of values.

A team of Greenkeeper and Snyk developers has jointly built the current state of automated dependency updates on the Snyk platform and we are poised to collaborate in the future. It was important for us to make sure we can take the values that made Greenkeeper the exceptional pioneer in this space and make sure we bring them into the Snyk feature set. In addition, Snyk cared a lot about the experiences we’ve made along the way and that allowed us to design a new dependency update system that should address the most frequent requests we receive in terms of features and functionality.

All Greenkeeper users will be in good hands at Snyk. Migration to Snyk is not automatic: since access to source code is a delicate matter, all migrations are opt-in and require user action. There is no automatic transfer of any data, or access control, from Greenkeeper to Snyk without explicit user action. We worked hard to make the transition as easy as possible for most users.

Looking back, we are extremely proud of what we achieved with Greenkeeper since we launched in 2015. We were not the first service to help with dependencies in a more automated fashion, but we were the first to independently develop a model that directly integrates with the modern developer workflow using Pull Requests, a model that is widely used in a variety of tools today.

We pushed boundaries at GitHub on the API and Marketplace where Greenkeeper use clearly exceeded their anticipated usage patterns. We worked closely with GitHub to keep all this away from customers and open source users, and have in this way, paved the way for an entirely new generation of automated developer tooling, which now is culminating in GitHub Actions.

Greenkeeper also pioneered a central part of how many modern open source projects are maintained. As the progenitors of semantic-release, companion tooling to Greenkeeper, which makes maintaining large sets of dependencies in-house or as open source projects a breeze. Greenkeeper itself is already open source, and it is going to remain available, but Neighbourhoodie is no longer going to invest in its development.

We thank all current and former customers and open source users for their patronage, their encouragement, their bug reports and their patience when things went less than optimal. We trust we prepared an easy and safe transition to Snyk for you all and we wish you all the best in your software development endeavours.

Team Neighbourhoodie