GitHub announced some new features and updates at its Satellite 2020 event this week, covering the cloud, collaboration, security and more.
Like other tech companies, the Microsoft-owned code hosting platform has chosen to move its annual developer event online due to the COVID-19 crisis, and Satellite 2020 is GitHub’s first virtual conference of the year.
GitHub Codespaces
The highlight of the event is a program calledGitHub CodespacesThe product is designed to make it easier for developers to join projects, launch the developer environment and start coding with minimal configuration – all from the browser.
“Contributing code to the community can be difficult. Each repository has its own way of configuring the development environment, which often takes dozens of steps before any code is written, “writes GitHub senior vice president of product Shanku Niyogi. “Even worse, sometimes the environments you’re working on conflict with each other. GitHub Codespaces gives you a fully featured cloud hosted development environment that can be launched directly within GitHub in seconds, so you can start contributing to the project immediately.”
Available in a ‘limited public beta’ starting this week, Codespaces is a cloud-managed development environment with all GitHub features that can be set up to load developer code as well as dependencies, extensions and dotfiles, and includes a built-in debugger.
Notably, Microsoft launched an Online version of Visual Studio called Visual Studio Online last year and recently renamed It Visual Studio Codespaces. This gives a strong hint of the building blocks for the new GitHub Codespace – it’s likely that Microsoft is bringing the Visual Code branding and browser-based functionality to GitHub.
GitHub Codespaces is currently in beta and free to use. The company has not yet set a price for the service since its launch, but Niyogi said the price will be similar to GitHub Actions.
GitHub Discussions
Another major new feature announced at the event isGitHub Discussions, where developers can ask questions and communicate about specific issues or topics in the project repository. Until then, such discussions can only passissuesandpull requestsTo carry out.
With GitHub Discussions, GitHub is now looking to build a community knowledge base outside of the main code base and, in fact, seems to be setting out to achieve something similar to Stack Overflow. The discussion is thematic and questions can be marked “answered” for future reference.
GitHub Discussions has been available in limited private Beta versions in several open source communities for some time, and the company says it will be available to all open source communities this summer.
Code scan and secret scan
On the security front, GitHub also announced two new features: code scanning and secret scanning. Code scanning checks for potential security vulnerabilities in your code. It is composed ofCodeQLSupported, free for open source projects.
Secret scanning (formerly known as token scanning) helps companies identify encrypted secrets in code so they can be undone before bad actors can intercept them. Since 2018, secret scans have been available for public repositories and are now available for private repositories as well.
Both of these features are part of GitHub Advanced Security.
