The GitHub Blog

Any READMEs ending in .markdown or .textile will now be displayed using the proper filter. Take Josh’s here, for instance.

Sexy.

Update: We speak RDoc now, too. Use the .rdoc extension.

Edit: these features have been replaced by https://github.com/explore.

Wondering what’s hot on GitHub? Wonder no further. We just pushed out the popular forked and popular watched charts. They’ll be updated nightly with the latest and greatest.

Now that we’re gathering some juicy data you can expect things like ‘Recently Popular’ and ‘Most Active’ in the near future.

We now have a Google Group for discussions. Use it to ask questions, talk about ideas, whatever. We’ll see you there.

http://groups.google.com/group/github/

Apparently some of the more popular feed readers can’t handle HTTP authentication, SSL feeds, or a combination of the two. No matter! GitHub private feeds are now accessible via a private token.

Note that whenever you change your password, your token will change. This is a feature – if you’re ever worried about your token getting out there, just change your password.

The old, HTTP authenticated feeds still work without a token, too.

Update: Thanks to Mislav, the feed now validates (whoops) and works over SSL.

We’ll have an hour or two of downtime tonight around midnight PST while the awesome dudes at Engine Yard upgrade our disk capacity. Thanks, see you on the flip side.

As the launch draws near I thought I’d share some awesome things people have been saying about the GH.

What’s amazing about Github is how it really brings the social aspect into play. Chris and Tom are showing us all visually how git development is supposed to work. I know I personally had some bing moments once I started pulling in commits from external git repos.

- Rick Olson

You’ve probably heard this at least twelve times in the last week, but github is totally badass. I’ve never had a reason to put my code up on a hosting service like that before, but now I do.

- Josh Susser

If you don’t know about git and github yet, it’s time you clean up your RSS feeds and find some good source of information.

- Matt Aimonetti

Chris and Tom are totally onto something with GitHub. It’s the perfect glue for the existing social network of open source developers.

- Jesse Newland

[GitHub] marks a turning point for me in my opensource contribution. The barrier to entry for pushing patches is so low that I expect to see myself cloning a bunch more repos and making my teeny tiny fixes.

- Kamal Fariz

All in all, it’s a great service – the way SourceForge should have been.

- Emmanuele Bassi

A quick stroll through Twitter confirms it: you will thank yourself for signing up at GitHub.

Alright, not everyone has moved to Git yet. For the old fashioned we now provide tarball downloads.

They should work with any branches or tags, defaulting to master. Yet another excuse for not moving to GitHub: destroyed!

Lately people have been asking about our pricing plan. While we’re not ready to reveal it quite yet, we are ready to talk about one aspect of it: GitHub will host open source projects for free.

There will, of course, be a reasonable size limit. To give some context, a fresh checkout of the 100k+ LOC Rails project is only 2.2 megs. Furthermore, only 3 of GitHub’s 2000 existing users are using more than 50 megabytes on public projects. Git is very space efficient.

What about forks? Well, let’s say you’re hosting a 40 megabyte open source project and I fork it. Because Git is so awesome at handling space, my forked repo uses less than 1 megabyte initially.

Big open source projects needing more than the limit should contact us. We’d love to sponsor your development.

GitHub is most definitely the best way to do open source. Sign up for a beta invite (if you haven’t already) and see for yourself.

Update: We’ve discontinued this feature.

Just like Facebook and FriendFeed, we’re now showing off our commit log. Not every change merits a blog post, y’know?

You can now add multiple emails to your account using the, uh, account link.

And hey, are your commits not being linked to your GitHub account?

Here’s why: the most recent commit was signed with a different email address. To get that commit to say ‘defunkt’ and link to me, I need to add that email address to my account.

Not sure what email address is being used? Try git show <sha>, where <sha> is the commit’s id.

For now the email address you signed up with is set in stone, but you’ll be able to change it soon.

rtomayko says GitHub is ‘Myspace for Hackers’ over on his blog. Flattering, yes, but read closely: this dude gets it.

From his post:

“Pull requests” happen every day over email without GitHub but, by sucking those interactions into a web application and recording certain bits and pieces as they transact, GitHub is able to 1.) guide git newbies in using fairly advanced concepts, and 2.) record that the interactions took place, which makes it possible to build entirely new types of tools.

Guilty as charged.

We added a ‘profile’ link to your badge tonight, giving you easy access to your public profile. It’s, more or less, what everyone else sees.

To go with it, we also added a little block o’ info. Share your basic vital statistics with perfect strangers! With, of course, hCardy goodness.

Want to see a field added to the profile? Let us know.

The first repository in the production db was created October 29th. The first private beta repository was created January 12th. The 1,000th repository was created today, Feburary 25th. (And yeah, that’s not counting deleted repositories.)

Sound slow? Consider this: 400 of those repositories were created in the last week.

That’s all for now. See you at 10,000.

Activity feeds are now active. Three, in particular: events for you, events from you, and public events from you.

The private feeds are protected with HTTP authentication. You need to use your GitHub username (or email address) and password to access them.

In case it’s not clear: events ‘for you’ are events that pertain to a repository you are watching or a user you are following. If you are following me and I edit a wiki, you will see that. If I am watching your repository and you push a change, I will see that.

It’s a great way to keep tabs on what’s going on with projects you care about.

Last night I pushed out a feature Tom and I have been talking about since day one: pull requests. That’s the short walkthrough.

You can use it to tell people who forked from you they need to pull, or they can use it to ask you to pull. It’s also great for letting someone else know you have a cool feature pushed to some non-master branch.