The GitHub Blog: New Features

One year ago today, Atom went from private alpha to open source software in hopes that the sunshine would help it reach its true potential.

Thanks to you, our users and contributors, Atom has had an incredible year. The number of contributors has skyrocketed, and with your support, the Atom team has hurdled significant technical challenges. Every day, the editor gets better, and its performance and stability improves. Take a look at how far Atom has come:

The future

With the help of many developers around the world, Atom 1.0 is in sight. We have been rapidly knocking items off of our 1.0 feature list, and plan on releasing 1.0 next month. It's been a very exciting year, and we look forward to many more as the Atom community grows.

Last year, we exposed repository and organization metadata to help you showcase your open source efforts on GitHub Pages. We're adding releases metadata to that list, allowing you to more easily display information about your project's latest version (including release notes) and link directly to download the most recent releases.

Releases are exposed in the site.github.releases namespace within Jekyll, and contain all the information exposed through the releases API. For more information, see the Repository metadata on GitHub Pages help article.

Happy releasing!

The Organization audit log allows you to quickly review actions performed by members of your organization on GitHub. You may need to look for specific activity or even through your organization's entire audit log to help aid in legal cases or keep record of suspicious activity.

To do just that, you now have the tools to export your organization's audit log in either JSON or CSV format.

At Microsoft Build 2015, we announced deep GitHub integration in Visual Studio 2015, along with GitHub Enterprise 2.2.0. This release will help developers who work with the Microsoft stack make GitHub Enterprise a seamless part of their existing workflow. If you'd prefer to skip the summary, you can see a full list of new features in the release notes. If you're interested in the highlights, read on.

GitHub Enterprise now supported on Hyper-V and available on Microsoft Azure

It's important to be able to deploy and run GitHub Enterprise wherever you want. If your team works on the Microsoft stack, we have great news. With the 2.2.0 release, you can now host GitHub Enterprise in the Windows ecosystem using Hyper-V for local hosting or Azure for cloud hosting.

To request a 45-day trial of GitHub Enterprise on Azure just let us know.

GitHub Extension for Visual Studio

The new GitHub Extension for Visual Studio lets you work on GitHub repositories within Visual Studio 2015. Once you download the latest version of Visual Studio, you can log in to GitHub, clone and create repositories, and publish your local work without leaving your IDE. To see a walkthrough of the features, check out this video on Microsoft's Channel 9.

Microsoft Developer Assistant

In case you missed it, Microsoft also announced the availability of the Microsoft Developer Assistant for Visual Studio 2015—a way for developers to search for code on GitHub.com from Visual Studio. Just enter your query and you will see links to public code on GitHub.com, along with information about the project.

Wait, there’s more!

Beyond the Microsoft integration you’ll find lots more to like in Enterprise 2.2.0 including:

• PDF rendering
• Mobile web notifications
• Quick pull requests
• Xen hypervisor support

For a full list of what’s new, check out the release notes.

If you already use GitHub Enterprise, you can download the latest release from enterprise.github.com.

If you are attending Build 2015 and want to learn more, visit the GitHub booth on the third floor.

Distributed version control systems like Git have enabled new and powerful workflows, but they haven't always been practical for versioning large files. We're excited to announce Git Large File Storage (LFS) as an improved way to integrate large binary files such as audio samples, datasets, graphics, and videos into your Git workflow.

Git LFS is a new, open source extension that replaces large files with text pointers inside Git, while storing the file contents on a remote server like GitHub.com or GitHub Enterprise.

Git LFS is easy to download and configure, works on all major platforms, and is open sourced under the MIT license.

Early access to Git LFS support on GitHub.com

We're ready to roll out Git LFS support to a select group of users. If you'd like to be one of the first to try it out on GitHub.com, sign up for early access using your GitHub account.

In the future, every repository on GitHub.com will support Git LFS by default.

Pricing

Every user and organization on GitHub.com with Git LFS enabled will begin with 1 GB of free file storage and a monthly bandwidth quota of 1 GB. If your workflow requires higher quotas, you can easily purchase more storage and bandwidth for your account.

Want to start working with large files on GitHub.com? Sign up for early access.

Branches are an essential part of collaborating using GitHub Flow. And it's now easier than ever to browse a repository's branches on your phone.

Using the new dropdown, you can access the recently active branches for a project or browse through all of its branches.

Web notifications on GitHub keep you apprised of the latest activity from the repositories you watch within your browser. With the addition of mobile web notifications, now you can stay up to date from your phone.

If you already use web notifications, you'll see a familiar indicator in the top right of every page whenever you have unread activity.

Use the switcher at the top of the page to filter your notifications. By default we show all your unread activity across the repositories you watch, but filtering to a specific repository—or even just the threads you're participating in—is just a couple taps away.

When you want to skip a notification, you can always mark it as read. Tap the checkmark on the right of individual notifications and they're immediately updated. You can also use the link in each repository group's header to mark multiple notifications as read.

New to web or email notifications on GitHub? Head to your account settings to customize how and where you receive notifications for the repositories you watch.

We've been displaying 3D, map, and tabular files for a while now. We're now happy to add PDF documents to the list!

Simply browse to a PDF document and we'll render it in your browser like any other file. From presentations to papers, we've got you covered. Many thanks to Mozilla and every contributor to PDF.js. If you have any further questions, check out the help article.

Just like our Mac client, you can now use GitHub for Windows to submit pull requests to GitHub or GitHub Enterprise, right from your desktop.

We didn't forget forks, either! If you fork a repository and then want to contribute changes to the upstream repository, GitHub for Windows will keep track of upstream branches. This means less hassle when you're ready to contribute your changes back.

Download GitHub for Windows and start sending pull requests now!

We’ve just redesigned GitHub for Mac’s Changes tab to make it even easier to review lots of changes, and to see what will be shared before clicking Sync:

This means that you can focus solely on what’s most important to you: your changes.

We’ve also simplified and improved the process for fixing up a commit you’ve just made. Just click the “Undo” button in the pane that appears:

And if you don’t want to worry about manually syncing your changes after committing, you can enable “Automatically Sync after Committing” from the Edit menu:

This is yet another step toward our grand vision for GitHub for Mac, with plenty more to come, so give it a shot! If you already have GitHub for Mac installed, it will update itself to the latest version automatically.

As always, we’d love to know what you think. If you have any comments, questions or bug reports, please let us know.

Applications integrate with GitHub to help you and your team build, test, and deploy software. But not all apps are created equal. By adopting a list of approved applications, organization admins can better manage which apps can be given access to their organization's data.

Approve trusted applications

If you're administering an organization on GitHub.com, you can set up a whitelist of trusted third-party applications.

With this protection in place, all applications need your explicit approval before they can access your organization's resources. You can grant access to your favorite continuous integration service (for example), while ignoring other applications that you may not trust or need.

Request your favorite tools

If you're a member of an organization and have a third-party application that you want to use, simply ask your organization's admins to approve access. They can then review the requested application to decide whether it should have access to your organization's data.

For more information on setting up a list of approved applications for your organization, be sure to check out the docs.

If you develop an app that integrates with GitHub, check out the Developer Blog for our latest recommendations on working with organizations and their data.

Pull requests are fantastic. We use them every day to review and discuss code, documentation, and designs. Now you can create pull requests without leaving the warm embrace of GitHub for Mac.

We've also made forks easier to work with. Forked repositories now automatically fetch their upstream repository, and its branches can be checked out or merged. No more futzing with the command line or multiple remotes!

Download GitHub for Mac and start sending pull requests!

Starting conversations around changes is what pull requests and GitHub Flow are all about, so we’re excited to introduce a powerful shortcut that gets you there even faster.

When using your browser to edit a file on GitHub.com, the web-based commit composer lets you quickly propose a change to a new branch and then immediately open a pull request for discussion and review:

Reducing the time it takes to open a pull request lowers the contribution barrier, and having this workflow available entirely within the browser makes collaboration more approachable for people with all technical skill levels.

To learn how GitHub Flow works, and whether it might be a good workflow to use on your projects, check out our guide on Understanding GitHub Flow.

Ever found yourself in a situation where your working directory contains a mix of changes that don't quite fit together? It would be easy to commit it all at once and move on; however, small, focused commits are great for making it easy to review and discuss a branch of work - especially when working on a complex codebase.

But how can you choose which changes to use in a commit?

The newest release of GitHub for Windows supports selecting lines or blocks of changes when creating a commit. Simply click the desired lines in the gutter, create the commit, and leave the other changes for you to continue working on.

For people familiar with the command line, this change is similar to interactive staging using git add -i or git add -p.

Whether you're reviewing project issues from your phone while traveling for business, or trying to find a specific Node.js repository to show a friend at lunch, we want the GitHub.com mobile experience to serve you well.

That's why we've enabled search on mobile devices, making it easier for you to find repositories, developers, and issues all from the palm of your hand using GitHub's powerful search syntax.

Happy searching!