GitHub Inc., a provider of hosting for software development code version control, today announced a number of new features and products at its virtual developer conference GitHub Universe 2020.

The first addition to the lineup is Sponsors for Companies, which extends the ability to sponsor open-source projects from individuals – who could support open-source developers starting last year – to companies. Those investments continue to grow rapidly and some developers now make up to six figures using GitHub Sponsors.

Some companies already signed up for Sponsors include American Express, Amazon Web Services Inc., Daimler AG, Stripe Inc., Microsoft Corp. and New Relic Inc.

“At New Relic developers are at the heart of everything we do, and that includes investing in the growth of a thriving open-source community,” Jonan Scheffler, director of developer relations at New Relic. “Our open-source vision dovetails well with GitHub’s model to build stronger open-source communities for developers.”

New GitHub features

Developers will find their daily experience made better with some new features, including dark mode, auto-merge on pull requests, discussions and dependency review.

According to GitHub, “Dark Mode” has been a long-requested user interface enhancement and just arrived in beta and will be helpful in saving the eyes of many developers who prefer to work in low light condition, or just don’t want the glare of a bright white background.

Doing a pull request can be tedious because it requires a lot of review before merging it with the main branch of code, which takes time and a lot of double-checking. That’s what the auto-merge on pull request feature was designed to help solve, by checking the review status of merges on pulls so that developers can move on more quickly.

Discussions provides a dedicated space for developers to talk, ask and answer questions and have open-ended conversations. It can be attached to a repository and it provides a way to curate and maintain conversation threads related issues.

“After using GitHub Discussions for one week, we decided to move the ImageMagick forum onto Discussions,” Dirk Lemstra, maintainer for ImageMagick. “Our core team receives up to five questions from our community each day and prior to Discussions, people were opening issues, emailing us, or asking questions on our PHP forum. This combination left us with a scattered set of notifications. Discussions saved me time because now, it’s just one inbox — and that became my GitHub notifications inbox.”

GitHub Enterprise Server 3.0

GitHub also announced the release of version 3.0 of Enterprise Server with a bevy of new features that will launch with it on Dec. 16. These features include Actions that will automate workflows for continuous deployment and integration, packages, code scanning, mobile support in beta and secret scanning in beta.

With GitHub Actions, developers can map out workflows using visualization, track progress in real-time, making it easier to see complex workflows and communicate status with the rest of the team. The visualizer will even display workflow metadata and directly link to source code and deployment URLs, making it easier to troubleshoot issues with runs when something goes wrong.

Developers can accidentally commit “secrets” into their publicly visible code — for example, passwords or encryption tokens for connecting to external accounts — and that’s what Secret scanning looks for, now available in beta with Enterprise Server 3.0. Enterprise Server customers can now also automate advanced security, including code and secret scanning into workflows as part of the server deployment.

GitHub plans to update Actions later this month with protected environments and required reviewers, in beta, for private repositories on GitHub Enterprise Cloud and all public repositories on GitHub.com. Also, workflow visualization, deployments, and deployment logs will enter public beta for everyone on GitHub.com.

Images: GitHub