Drupal 12 is coming later this year. As with previous major releases, the contributed ecosystem will require updating for breaking changes . Thousands of modules and themes will need their deprecated API uses updated before they are ready. Doing that by hand, across all of contrib, would cost the community an enormous number of hours.
That is the job the Project Update Bot exists to do. We have refreshed it, and it now targets Drupal 12 readiness: it scans contributed projects automatically and opens issues with patches that fix deprecated API uses for you.
If you are a maintainer, you should already know the bot. For the Drupal 12 cycle, our rector rules grew to cover more than 80% of the deprecated API uses introduced in that release. Using our proven toolset: Gábor Hojtsy's Upgrade Status for the analysis, and Drupal Rector for the fixes, now maintained primarily by SWIS and the glue that puts it all together Project Analysis.
Two things improved this round. Rule coverage is more complete, some of that came from AI-generated rector rules based on Dries Buytaert's drupal-digests. And submodule dependencies are now resolved during analysis. In the earlier cycles we scanned submodules but not their dependencies, which caused failed scans and false errors. That is fixed now, so results are cleaner and considerably more accurate.
Patches arrive as either GitLab or Drupal.org issues. The two work a little differently, and every issue the bot opens explains how to apply the patch, pause the bot, or close it. You stay in control of your project throughout.
If you have questions or want to help, we are in #d12readiness on Drupal Slack. And if a patch looks wrong, tell us so we can fix the rule for everyone, open an issue in the Drupal Rector or project_analysis queue.
The bot builds on a lot of other people's work in Upgrade Status, Drupal Rector and drupal-digests. Thanks also to the maintainers who let us test the refreshed bot on their repositories.