GitHub announced a slew of updates and new features at the GitHub Universe event this week. Here are some of the key announcements.
GitHub Sponsors
GitHub sponsors was launched last year and since then companies have been keen to get involved, according to GitHub. Announced at Universe, GitHub Sponsors for companies enables organisations to invest in the open source developers and projects that they depend on via their existing billing arrangements. Sponsors supports payment via credit card or PayPal at present.
Actions
GitHub announced environments, required reviewers, deployments and deployment logs, and a new workflow visualiser.
Workflow visualisation for GitHub Actions maps workflows, and tracks their progression in real time, including displaying workflow metadata and directly linking to source code. Deployment URLs are said to make it easier to troubleshoot runs when something goes wrong.
Dark mode
A favourite among many, ‘dark mode’ is now available in public beta and can be configured in settings or set it to track your system preferences.
Discussions
Discussions was released in limited beta and is now available to all public repositories. GitHub says they worked with hundreds of open source communities – like Vercel, Gatsby, Prisma and Laravel – to get feedback on the features that matter most to their communities and added a bunch of new features such as customisable categories for incoming discussions, and closer integration with GitHub notifications.
New security features
For the security conscious, ‘Dependency graph’ helps developers understand dependencies, and security alerts will notify them of newly discovered vulnerabilities in those dependencies. Additionally, dependency review helps reviewers and contributors understand dependency changes and their security impact at every pull request.
According to GitHub, it provides an easy to understand view of dependency changes introduced by the pull request, within the review experience with a rich diff on the Files Changed tab. Dependency review beta will be available to all public repositories and Advanced Security customers on GitHub Enterprise Cloud
GitHub Enterprise Server 3.0
GitHub Enterprise Server brings built in CI/CD and automation capabilities to the platform with GitHub Actions and Packages. In addition, Enterprise Server customers can now automate Advanced Security, including code and secret scanning, into their workflows as part of the server deployment. It will be available on December 16th.