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

With more than 73 million developers now on GitHub, developers are at the centre of everything the company does, it said. Since the last GitHub Universe, the company has shipped more than 20,000 improvements to the platform for developers, open source communities, and enterprise teams.

GitHub Copilot, an AI pair programmer to help developers write better code and faster, available in technical preview, has added language support for Jetbrains and Java. GitHub Copilot was introduced in June and now 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.

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To enable software development in the cloud, GitHub Enterprise Cloud has added custom repository roles. It has improved access controls to help teams ship more securely. GitHub admins can now create custom permission levels for teams, organisation members, and outside collaborators.

It has also announced improvements to Codespaces. 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,” it said.

The announcement also includes improvements such as a new devcontainer feature composition, GitHub CLI support, expanded access control for port forwards, and Rest API support. The company also announced a range of new updates and enhancements to help developers manage their daily workflow.

GitHub Issues will now be available to all users in public beta, and at no additional cost. It is a new workflow experience that includes features like project boards and dynamic tables, which give developers the ability to filter, sort, and group issues and pull requests.

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Other key features include iteration support, new reporting and data visualisation, and public projects. In GitHub Discussions, it has added labels to help sort discussions and automatic release notes with shoutouts to contributors.

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.”

It has also introduced a new command palette (public beta) to help developers navigate around GitHub more seamlessly. “With a new host of commands starting with a single shortcut, developers can optimise their workflows across organisations, repositories, issues, pull requests, and more from anywhere on GitHub,” it explained.

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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).

“As one of the 10 most popular languages in the open source community, Ruby is now supported by the CodeQL analysis engine that powers GitHub code scanning,” it said.

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