GitHub Universe 2021 has now ended, with a wide ranging set of improvements and new features announced at the conference. These ranged from making the new GitHub Issues a public beta, through improved CI/CD with GitHub Actions, to improvements to GitHub Codespaces.

The first announcement made at Universe is the addition of labels and automatic release notes for GitHub Discussions.

Labels are designed to be used when you want to sort discussions, and to automate release notes. Discussions are also now supported on the GitHub Mobile app. Other improvements to Discussions start with support for GitHub Actions integration. Developers can now trigger Actions workflows on Discussion and DiscussionComment webhook events.

The next improvement is the moving of the new GitHub Issues to a public beta. Issues can be used to track workflows with project tables and boards that can be used to filter, sort, and group issues and pull requests. Issues can also be used to switch between working in the open and in private with public projects.

GitHub Actions now have improved CI/CD support with the addition of the ability to carry out secure deployments with OpenID Connect, deployment environments to simplify approvals, improvements to reusable workflows, and new auto-scaling functionality for self-hosted runners.
There's a new Pull request merge queue that is designed to make is simpler to merge pull requests without updating your pull requests anytime.

GitHub Codespaces has also been improved. Codespaces can be used to spin-up fresh dev environments directly from the browser or through Visual Studio Code. The improvements start with an easier way to create dev environments, as you can now create and update the devcontainer.json development environment as code definitions with a one-click setup.

Other improvements to Codespaces include support for it in the GitHub CLI, and a new REST API in beta. This is designed to make it easier to programmatically manage your Codespaces, including machine types and secrets. There's also new access control for forward ports, and to GitHub Container Registry. Codespaces is currently only available for GitHub Team and Enterprise accounts.

The GitHub team also announced the expansion of code scanning to support Ruby. Announcing this, GitHub's Thomas Dohmke said that as Ruby is the 10th most popular language within the open source community, support has been added for Ruby in the CodeQL engine that powers GitHub code scanning. The Ruby support is currently in beta. CodeQL analysis identifies security issues in your code, along with the flow of data to the vulnerable location. CodeQL for Ruby is now available by default in GitHub.com code scanning, the CodeQL CLI, and the CodeQL extension for Visual Studio Code. It will also be included in GitHub Enterprise Server 3.4. Ruby joins the list of supported CodeQL languages, which also includes C/C++, C#, Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, and Go.

More Information

GitHub Universe 2021

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