The GitHub Blog: New Features

If you publish a blog using GitHub pages, it's now easier for others to subscribe to updates. The Jekyll Feed plugin, now available to all GitHub Pages sites, can automatically generate an Atom (RSS-like) feed of your most recent posts.

While it's always been possible to generate feeds using hand-written XML, the Jekyll Feed plugin includes a battle-tested template that handles things like encoding issues and relative URLs, allowing you to concentrate on what matters: your content.

For more information, including installation instructions, see the Feeds for GitHub Pages help article.

Happy syndicating!

It’s all too easy to force push to the wrong branch, overwriting someone else’s changes with your own. Sometimes it results in losing work (unless you know how to undo almost anything in Git).

Over the next few weeks we’ll be rolling out a new feature called Protected Branches which gives repository administrators the ability to disable force pushes to specific branches. When it’s enabled for your repositories you’ll be able to go to the Branches tab in repository settings and protect branches:

In addition to blocking force pushes, a protected branch can have required status checks. Required status checks make integrations that use our Status API enforceable and you can disable the merge button until they pass:

When using required status checks, your branch must be up-to-date to ensure your tests will pass after merging. The new “Update branch” button lets you merge the latest changes from the base branch of the Pull Request with one click.

• Read more about Protected Branches
• Learn about GitHub’s Status API

You've been able to view and diff geospatial data on GitHub for a while, but now, in addition to being able to collaborate on the GeoJSON files you upload to GitHub, you can more easily contribute to the underlying, shared basemap, that provides your data with context.

The basemap we use — the layer that includes common elements like roads, rivers, and buildings over which your data is displayed — is powered by OpenStreetMap. You can think of OpenStreetMap somewhat like Wikipedia for geospatial data. It's a community of mappers and an open, collaborative dataset.

Next time you view a GeoJSON file on GitHub, if you spot something that looks a bit off, simply click the "improve the underlying map" link in the top right corner of the map. From there, you can edit the map in your browser with a few clicks, or if you're in a hurry, you can leave a note for an editor to review later.

Last year millions of people used GitHub to collaborate on geospatial data. By making it a little easier to contribute back, we hope that the GitHub community can support the OpenStreetMap community, without which none of this would be possible.

Happy social mapping!

The area above the merge button now contains more information, making it easier to see if your proposed changes are ready to go or need more work.

Each month, 119,000 repositories on GitHub use automated status checks (via the GitHub Statuses API) and it’s important that this information is presented in a way that you can easily understand. When you’re ready to merge a pull request, you should be able to see that it is ready. If a check isn’t passing, you should be able to see why.

Here’s a refresher on how to merge a pull request.

Previously, if you removed collaborator permissions from someone contributing to a private repository on your personal account, that person would retain their fork (if they had created one).

Today, we're changing that behavior: if you remove a collaborator's permissions from one of your private repositories, their fork will be deleted, giving you greater control over access to your private code. This matches the behavior of organization-owned forks, which hasn't changed.

If you would like a sneak peek at a new way to contribute to GitHub from your desktop, sign up for our First Look program. Opting in will give you early access to upcoming features and updates. You'll also have the opportunity to help shape the quality and direction of GitHub's desktop app. We'd love to hear what you think.

The GitHub File Finder is now available on your mobile device. Just click the "Jump to file" link on any repository.

GitHub is pleased to announce that version 1.0 of the Atom text editor is now available from atom.io. Read the full behind the scenes story over on the Atom blog.

The entire Atom team is attending CodeConf this week and will be presenting a session all about Atom 1.0 featuring Chris Wanstrath, Ben Ogle, and Daniel Hengeveld. Watch along tomorrow, June 26th, at 11AM EDT: https://live-stream.github.com

Navigating what's most important to you on GitHub.com just got a little easier with our updated site header.

The new header gives you faster access to your pull requests and issues dashboards from anywhere on the site. If you're unfamiliar with them, these dashboards list all of your open pull requests and issues—as well as those you've been mentioned in or are assigned to—in one place. Use them to stay up to date on what needs to be done across your projects.

Lastly, clicking your avatar now opens a new dropdown menu with links to your profile, account settings, and more. As a small bonus, we've also included a new Your stars link for easy access to your starred repositories.

Enjoy!

Organizations have always been the best way for teams to work together and collaborate on code. We're happy to announce major improvements to GitHub organization permissions. These improvements include new customizable member privileges, fine-grained team permissions, and more open communication.

The improved permissions system gives your organization the flexibility to work the way you want. Here are just a few highlights:

• (Opt-in) Members can view and mention all teams, even when they're not on those teams.
• (Opt-in) Members can create repositories without help from an owner.
• Members can create new teams to self-organize with the people they work with.
• Owners can give just the right amount of access to contractors and interns by adding them to repositories without giving them the privileges of organization members.
• And many more! Learn about GitHub's improved organization permissions.

All of these new features give your organization the ability to work together seamlessly without everyone needing to be an owner.

Once these features launch, organization owners will be able to turn on new permissions as needed. Simply opt-in when you're ready.

Coming soon

In the next few months, every organization on GitHub.com will have the improved permissions system.

When we shipped the new GitHub Issues, we made it easy to scope lists of Issues and Pull Requests with filters like author, date, mentions, and team mentions. With the new status: filter you can now filter the Pull Requests in your repositories by combined status.

If you're taking advantage of the Status API, or using an integration that does, try out the new filters:

• status:success Only pull requests with all successful statuses
• status:failure Only pull requests that have statuses in the failure or error state
• status:pending Only pull requests with no statuses or at least one status in the pending state

GitHub for Windows now makes it even easier to see everything local to your machine, whether it's uncommitted changes or commits you haven't synced yet.

One of the things you'll notice when creating commits is the new, compact list of changed files in your working directory.

GitHub for Windows shows the number of files that a commit changed and lets you drill down to see what changed in a given file.

The updated branch selector now groups your recently used branches so that you can jump straight back in to what you were doing before that pesky hotfix distracted you.

We've given branch creation a dedicated place in the toolbar. As a bonus, you can pick which branch to base the new one off.

Finally, you can collapse the repository list to reclaim some screen space.

If you have GitHub for Windows installed it will automatically update to the latest version. If you don't have it installed, download GitHub for Windows from windows.github.com.

With the new billing manager role, you can invite individuals to manage the billing details of your organization without giving them access to code. The new role enables a user to:

• Upgrade or downgrade the organization’s plan.
• Update payment details like the credit card on file.
• View history of past transactions and download receipts.
• Receive receipts via email.

Billing managers won’t:

• Be able to create or access repositories in your organization.
• See private members of your organization.
• Be seen in the list of organization members.

Leave the payment details to your wonderful finance team, and get back to your code!

For more information on adding a billing manager to your organization, check out the help article.

GitHub is used by government agencies to collaborate on all sorts of interesting things, from software that aids first responders to White House policy, but sometimes agencies require a level of assurance that can only be afforded by a platform running on their own infrastructure.

Starting with version 2.2.2, released yesterday, AMIs for GitHub Enterprise, GitHub's self-hosted offering, are available in the AWS GovCloud (US) region, allowing US customers with specific regulatory requirements to run GitHub Enterprise in a federally compliant cloud environment.

What is GovCloud?

GovCloud is an isolated Amazon Web Services environment used by US government agencies at the federal, state, and local levels, along with contractors, researchers, educational institutions, and other US customers.

In terms of boxes checked, GovCloud has received a federal authority to operate (ATO), and conforms with U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) restrictions, Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) requirements, and Department of Defense (DoD) Cloud Security Model (CSM) Levels 3-5.

Getting started

You can begin using GitHub Enterprise in GovCloud today by requesting a free, 45-day trial, and customers that are already using GitHub Enterprise can migrate from other GitHub Enterprise deployment platforms to GovCloud by following these instructions.

If you have any questions about using GitHub in GovCloud, or GitHub + Government in general, please visit the AWS GovCloud page, or feel free to reach out to government@github.com at any time — we'd love to hear from you.

Happy (compliant) collaborating!

Communicating ideas that combine code, data and visualizations can be hard, especially if you're trying to collaborate in realtime with your colleagues.

Whether you're a researcher studying Wikipedia, an astronomer investigating the movements of galaxies in our cosmic neighborhood or a data-scientist at fashion retailer Stitch Fix, producing insights from data and sharing is a common challenge.

Jupyter notebooks solve this problem by making it easy to capture data-driven workflows that combine code, equations, text and visualizations and share them with others. From today Jupyter notebooks render in all their glory right here on GitHub.

With Git Large File Storage and Jupyter notebook support, GitHub has never been a better place to version and collaborate on data-intensive workflows. With more than 200,000 Jupyter notebooks already on GitHub we're excited to level-up the GitHub-Jupyter experience.

Looking to get started? Simply commit a .ipynb file to a new or existing repository to view the rendered notebook. Alternatively if you're looking for some inspiration then check out this incredible gallery of Jupyter notebooks.