News

GitHub Ships Enterprise Server 3.0 Release Candidate

• By David Ramel
• 01/22/2021

Microsoft's GitHub code hosting platform for version control and collaboration has shipped a Release Candidate for GitHub Enterprise Server 3.0.

"GitHub Enterprise Server is your organization's private copy of GitHub contained within a virtual appliance, hosted on premises or in the cloud, that you configure and control," GitHub documentation says.

This week the company announced the v3.0 RC, which it described as "the biggest ever change to Enterprise Server." Specifically, it highlighted advancements on these fronts:

• Actions -- developer-first workflow automation and CI/CD: The company said Actions, which ease the automation of software development workflows, is the No. 1 Continuous Integration (CI) solution on GitHub.com. While it was launched a year ago, and introduced as a limited beta in v.2.22, the v3.0 RC sees the inclusion of some top feature requests.
• Packages -- publish and consume packages together with code: This package hosting service, designed to create end-to-end DevOps workflows that include code, CI and deployment solutions, was also released as a beta with Actions. "Enterprise Server contains all the features developers love about Actions and Packages. Workflows can be triggered by events such as creating an issue, a new release, or opening a pull request -- making it easy to automate and customize your GitHub deployment," GitHub said. "And through GitHub Connect, you have access to over 6,700 actions in the GitHub Marketplace already written by our partners and the community."

• Mobile Apps (beta) -- iOS and Android apps for collaborating from any device: The company's GitHub Mobile solution was enhanced with support for GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES). It allows developers to triage notifications and manage issues and pull requests from a mobile device.

  

  The related issue says, "Developers will have the ability to sign into GitHub Enterprise Server accounts as well as a github.com account from the GitHub Mobile app on Android and iOS. If there are multiple accounts, developers can switch between active accounts. GitHub Mobile will only show features that the connected GHES instance supports."

Also announced were enhancements to GitHub Advanced Security, which helps developers spot security issues while coding. Specifically, v.3.0 RC includes code scanning. "It's a developer-first, GitHub-native approach to easily find security vulnerabilities before they reach production," GitHub said. "Powered by the world's most powerful code analysis engine, CodeQL, it automates security as an integral part of the developer workflow."

Along with that, the new release includes a beta version of secret scanning, described as "a lightning-fast engine that detects credentials in your code when they're pushed to GitHub."

More information can be found in the Jan. 15 announcement post and the release notes.

"All these new features are accompanied by security and architecture updates to modernize GitHub Enterprise Server," GitHub said. "The platform is now fully containerized, providing a platform to bring features to you faster and enable administrators to manage GitHub Enterprise Server more flexibly at any scale."