Github Announces Multiple New Product and Feature Enhancements To Improve Developer Experience

Software development hosting platform GitHub recently announced a suite of new products and feature enhancements to improve the developer experience, enable cloud coding, and ensure secure development at its GitHub Universe 2021 event.

Since the last GitHub universe, the company has delivered over 20,000 platform enhancements for developers, open-source communities, and enterprise teams.

GitHub Copilot, an AI pair programmer to help developers write better code and faster, is now available in technical preview and has added language support for Jetbrains and Java. GitHub Copilot was introduced in June and now also includes IDE support for the JetBrains IntelliJ platform of editors, including the latest versions of IntelliJ IDEA and PyCharm. 

GitHub also added support for multiline completions in Java, with additional language support to come in the coming months.

GitHub Enterprise Cloud has added custom repository roles to enable software development in the cloud. GitHub admins can now create custom permission levels for teams, organisation members, and outside collaborators.

Improvements to Codespaces were also announced. Codespaces, meant for teams and GitHub Enterprise Cloud, will expand tools for cloud dev environments. “With Codespaces, a developer can create a new, preconfigured cloud development environment in seconds,” the company said.

The announcement also updated on other improvements such as a new dev container feature composition, GitHub CLI support, expanded access control for port forwards, and Rest API support. Separately, developers can now merge pull requests more efficiently, without updating pull requests anytime another change lands, all while ensuring the branch remains green. Additionally, GitHub code scanning has added Ruby support (public beta).

GitHub Actions updates for improved CI/CD and automation include secure deployments with OpenID Connect, deployment environments to simplify approvals, improvements to reusable workflows, and new auto-scaling functionality for self-hosted runners. Other key features include iteration support, new reporting and data visualisation, and public projects for Github Issues.