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Repository Custom Properties GA and Ruleset Improvements

repository custom properties banner image

We’re excited to announce the general availability of Repository Custom Properties, a major enhancement to how repositories are managed and classified across GitHub organizations.

Properties offer a flexible way to add meaningful metadata to your repositories that simplifies repository classification, enhances discoverability, and seamlessly integrates with rulesets.

Check out this video from our own Jon Peck for a walk through of a common scenario.

New organization repositories list public beta

Starting today the new repositories list view moves to public beta.

Improvements to Repository Rulesets

Repository Rules now support adding Dependabot to bypass lists. This enables you to let Dependabot merge changes to a repository’s protected branch.

Learn more about managing custom properties for your organization and managing rulesets for your organization.

Head over to community discussions for feedback.

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CodeQL 2.16.1: Swift 5.9.2 Support, New Queries, and Scanned-File Count Changes

CodeQL 2.16.1 is now available to users of GitHub code scanning on github.com, and all new functionality will also be included in GHES 3.13. Users of GHES 3.12 or older can upgrade their CodeQL version.

Important changes in this release include:

Swift 5.9.2 is now supported.

We added a new query for Swift, swift/weak-password-hashing, to detect the use of inappropriate hashing algorithms for password hashing and a new query for Java, java/exec-tainted-environment, to detect the injection of environment variables names or values from remote input.

We improved the tracking of flows from handler methods of a PageModel class to the corresponding Razor Page (.cshtml) file, which may result in additional alerts from some queries.

JavaScript now supports doT templates and Go added support for AWS Lambda functions and fasthttp framework.

In the previous version, 2.16.0, we announced that we will update the way we measure the number of scanned files in the Code Scanning UI. This change is now live for JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Ruby, Swift, and C#.

For a full list of changes, please refer to the complete changelog for version 2.16.1.

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CodeQL 2.16: Python Dependency Installation Disabled, New Queries, and Bug Fixes

CodeQL 2.16.0 is now available to users of GitHub code scanning on github.com, and all new functionality will also be included in GHES 3.13. Users of GHES 3.12 or older can upgrade their CodeQL version.

Important changes in this release include:

In July 2023, we disabled automatic dependency installation for new CodeQL code scanning setups when analyzing Python code. With the release of CodeQL 2.16.0, we have disabled dependency installation for all existing configurations as well. This change should lead to a decrease in analysis time for projects that were installing dependencies during analysis, without any significant impact on results. A fallback environment variable flag is available to ease the transition, but will be removed in CodeQL 2.17.0. No action is required for Default setup users. Advanced setup users that had previously set the setup-python-dependencies option in their CodeQL code scanning workflows are encouraged to remove it, as it no longer has any effect.

We fixed a bug that could cause CodeQL to consume more memory than configured when using the --ram flag. If you have used this flag to manually override the memory allocation limit for CodeQL, you may be able to increase it slightly to more closely match the system’s available memory. No action is required for users of the CodeQL Action (on github.com or in GHES) who are not using this flag, as memory limits are calculated automatically.

We added 2 new C/C++ queries that detect pointer lifetime issues, and identify instances where the return value of scanf is not checked correctly. We added a new Java query that detects uses of weakly random values, which an attacker may be able to predict. Furthermore, we improved the precision and fixed potential false-positives for several other queries.

The measure of scanning Go files in the code scanning UI now includes partially extracted files, as this more accurately reflects the source of extracted information even when parts of a file could not be analyzed. We will gradually roll this change out for all supported languages in the near future.

We fixed a bug that led to errors in build commands for Swift analyses on macOS that included the codesign tool.

For a full list of changes, please refer to the complete changelog for version 2.16.0 and 2.15.5.

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Filter by push protection bypass in the secret scanning list view

In the secret scanning list view, you can now apply a filter to display alerts that are the result of having bypassed push protection. This filter can be applied at the repository, organization, and enterprise levels from the sort menu in the list view UI or by adding bypassed:true to the search bar.

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CodeQL 2.15.4: Performance Improvements and Updated Language Support

CodeQL 2.15.4 is rolling out to users of GitHub code scanning on github.com this week, and all new functionality will also be included in GHES 3.12. Users of GHES 3.11 or older can upgrade their CodeQL version.

Important changes in this release include:

  • Performance improvements on large runners (instances with 8 to 16 vCPUs) lead to a reduction in end to end analysis time between 5% and 15%, due to more effective parallelization. Where possible, upgrading to larger instances is recommend for projects that currently use 4 or fewer vCPUs and take more than 10 minutes to analyze.
  • Analysis times for C and C++ code bases of any size are reduced on average by 6%
  • TypeScript 5.3, Java 21 and Python 3.12 are now supported.
  • We have resolved a problem causing scan timeouts on macOS (the default for Swift analysis). This problem affected up to 10% of scans for some projects. Although timeouts may still occur, they are now expected in less than 0.5% of scans. We are actively addressing the remaining issues.

For a full list of changes, please refer to the complete changelog for version 2.15.4.

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CodeQL 2.15.3 supports Swift 5.9, improves C# analysis speed

CodeQL 2.15.3 is rolling out to users of GitHub code scanning on github.com this week, and all new functionality will also be included in GHES 3.12. Users of GHES 3.11 or older can upgrade their CodeQL version.

Important changes in this release include:

For a full list of changes, please refer to the complete changelog for version 2.15.3.

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Custom Organization Roles are now GA

Organization owners can now create and assign custom organization roles, which grant members and teams specific sets of privileges within the organization. Like custom repository roles, organization roles are made up of one or more fine-grained permissions, such as “read audit logs” or “manage repository rulesets”, and apply to the organization itself rather than the repository. This feature is available in all Enterprise Cloud organizations and will come to GitHub Enterprise Server by version 3.13.

A screenshot of the role creation page, with a new role called "Auditor" that grants access to just the audit log permission.

Today, organization custom roles supports 10 permissions:

Roles can be assigned by an organization owner only, to prevent accidental escalation of privileges, and can be assigned to users and teams. Multiple organization roles can be assigned directly to a user or team. Users and teams inherit roles from the teams they are a part of.

A screenshot showing a user that's assigned to two different roles.

More organization permissions will be built over time, similar to how repository permissions were added as well. If you have a specific permission you’d like to see added please get in touch with your account team or let us know in the discussion below. Everything you can see in the organization settings menu is an option, and we’ll be working with teams across GitHub to get those permissions created.

To learn more about custom organization roles, see “About custom organization roles“, and for the REST APIs to manage and assign these roles programmatically see “Organization roles“. For feedback and suggestions for organization permissions, please join the discussion within GitHub Community.

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GitHub Actions – Enforcing workflow scope when creating a release

Starting today, apps and tokens used to create a release via the REST API endpoint will require the workflow scope or workflows:write permission in certain cases.

The workflow scope or workflows:write will be required when creating a release that targets a commit SHA (target_commitish) that modifies an Actions workflow file and that SHA does not have an existing ref (branch head or tag).

For more details see the REST API documentation or visit the GitHub Actions community if you have any questions.

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Enabling reactive 2FA requirements for release creation

Users who are not part of the mandatory 2FA program will now be added to it within 24 hours of creating their first release. In August we expanded the 2FA requirement to include most GitHub.com users that had created a release. Those groups have now completed their 2FA enrollment, but additional developers have since created their first release. They will be added to the 2FA program in the coming days, as will more users over time as they create releases.

Enterprise or organization administrators can learn more about their users' current 2FA requirements by visiting the People page for their enterprise or organization.

To learn more about the 2FA program, see our May 2023 blog post, as well as the “About the mandatory 2FA program” documentation.

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GitHub Advanced Security billing API and CSV download now includes active committer email addresses

The GitHub Advanced Security billing REST API and CSV download now includes the email addresses for active committers. This provides information for insights into Advanced Security license usage across your business. Here is an example response from the GitHub Advanced Security billing REST API:

      "advanced_security_committers_breakdown": [
        {
          "user_login": "octokitten",
          "last_pushed_date": "2023-10-26",
          "last_pushed_email": "octokitten@email.com"
        }

Read more about the GHAS billing API here and the GHAS billing CSV download here.

This is available now on GitHub.com and will ship to GitHub Enterprise Server 3.12

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Code scanning default setup automatically includes all CodeQL supported languages

Code scanning default setup now automatically attempts to analyze all CodeQL supported languages in a repository. This means default setup supports all CodeQL languages at the organization level, including enabling code scanning from an organization's Security Overview coverage page or settings page.

Previously, users would have to manually include the languages C, C++, C#, Java, or Kotlin in a default setup analysis, and enabling these languages was not supported at the organization level. Now, code scanning default setup automatically attempts to analyze all languages supported by CodeQL in a repository. If any analyses fail, the failed language will be automatically deselected from the code scanning configuration. Any alerts from the successfully analyzed languages will be shown on GitHub. This means code scanning will automatically set up the best possible configuration to get started easily with CodeQL and show the most relevant alerts to developers.

A warning banner is shown in the repository settings page if any languages fail and are deseslected. The "edit configuration" page shows all languages in the configuration, and allows users to change the language selection if required. For more information about the languages and versions supported by CodeQL and code scanning, see Supported languages and frameworks. To learn more about code scanning, see About code scanning.

This change is already available on GitHub.com and will be available in GitHub Enterprise Server 3.12.

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Code scanning with CodeQL supports Go 1.21

To enable developers to write code as securely as possible in their language of choice and using the latest features available, we constantly update code scanning with CodeQL. As such we are happy to announce that CodeQL now supports analyzing code written in Go 1.21.

Go 1.21 support is available by default in GitHub.com code scanning, CodeQL version 2.14.6, and GHES 3.11. For more information about the languages and versions supported by CodeQL and code scanning, see Supported languages and frameworks. To learn more about code scanning, see About code scanning.

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