GitHub Inc., an open-source repository for managing and hosting code acquired last year by Microsoft Corp., today opened its annual GitHub Universe conference in San Francisco with a raft of improvements and new features for its service.

Announcements include the general availability of GitHub Actions and Packages, the launch of GitHub for mobile, a redesigned notifications experience and a number of other features.

In the past year alone, GitHub has grown by more than 10 million developers, contributing to more than 44 million repositories, with 80% of contributions from outside the U.S. That maps out to more than 87 million pull requests and in excess of 20 million issues closed this year, for a lot of bugs fixed.

GitHub Actions and Packages emerge from beta

Launched in beta test at the Universe conference last year, GitHub Actions, a community-led approach to software automation, is now generally available. Actions is a new feature that shapes how communities build and share automation for software development, including full continuous integration and continuous delivery or CI/CD solution for DevOps and native package management.

There are now more than 1,200 community-developed workflows available in the GitHub Marketplace with the list growing fast. Contributors include Amazon Web Services Inc., Google LLC, HashiCorp, Twilio Inc. and many others.

GitHub also announced the free use of self-hosted runners, artifact caching and the ability to run Actions on ARM-based architectures such as Raspberry Pi.

GitHub Packages is also now out of beta. Introduced in May, Packages (formerly GitHub Package Registry) is billed as the best way to combine source code and packages in one place with integrated permissions management and billing. Packages hosted in GitHub include details and download statistics, along with the code’s entire history.

Packages features include proxy support for the primary NPM registry, a Javascript package manager, support for using the GitHub Actions token and a raft of other improvements.

Github for mobile, Notifications, new code navigation and search features in beta

GitHub for mobile is being released into beta. It provides an interface that gives developers the flexibility to stay in touch with their team no matter where they are. Not all of GitHub requires a complex development environment, such as sharing feedback on design and reviewing a few lines of code. These tasks are now easier with a native experience on any device.

Other limited beta releases include Notifications, which takes push notifications and puts them on GitHub instead of developer’s inboxes and enables filters to surface what’s important. New code navigation features are aimed at improving the day-to-day lives of developers by delivering two features: jump to definition and find all references.

The latter uses a context-sensitive semantic library to find definitions and call sites in the code. A new code search experience in beta will be able to match exact results including special characters and casing as well as the standard heuristic text searches.

In another new development, it’s now possible for open-source projects to receive funding through GitHub Sponsors. It was launched in May and at the time people could sponsor individual developers working on GitHub, but the community also wanted to be able to sponsor the projects and thus the people involved as well.

So, now GitHub Sponsors has opened up to allowing project-level funding. GitHub will encourage transparency on the use of funds early on and share insights with contributors about funding decisions.

Finally, GitHub announced the latest release of GitHub Enterprise Server. This newest version, Enterprise Server 2.19, includes updates to community and project management, developer productivity and new security features that will make GitHub the safest place to build software in any environment.

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