The GitHub Blog: New Features

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.

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.

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.

The blog is finally here. This is where we’re gonna drop all sorts of Git and GitHub related eggs of knowledge: new features, upcoming features, bug fixes, etc etc.

Also, the promised per-project wikis are now live. Check out Backpacking’s for a modest start to a modest framework’s documentation.

As always, please keep filling up the feature request and bug report guide pages. We’re always watching.

Hey everyone, welcome to GitHub. Keep your feedreader pointed here for daily updates on new features, bug fixes, and general gitbauchery.

First up: we just enabled hotkeys for trees and the commit list. When viewing any repository, like my Ambition repo, you can hit c or t or p to be taken to the commit, the tree, or the parent.

When viewing the commit list on a repo, again using my Ambition repo’s list as a point of reference, you can use j to select a single commit or move to another commit, then use c or t or p to go to that commit’s diff page, tree, or parent. Just like in Gmail and Vim, k will move you up.

Definitely for power users, but something I’m using constantly already. We’ll be adding more hotkeys and a cheat sheet listing them all soon.

Oh yeah, and per-project wikis are coming soon. Real soon.