GitHub Enterprise Server 3.2 brings new color modes and added security capabilities

GitHub Enterprise Server 3.2 is available today as a release candidate. With this release, we’re shipping over 70 new features and changes to improve the developer experience and deliver new security capabilities for our customers. You can find all the changes in the release notes, but here are a few of the key themes in this release.

Remember, release candidates are a way for you to try the latest features at the earliest time, and they help us gather feedback early to ensure the release works in your environment. They should be tested on non-production environments.

A more delightful development experience

One of GitHub’s most popular changes from the past year, dark and dimmed themes are now available on GitHub Enterprise Server. These two new themes not only make your repositories look cooler, they reduce eye strain too.

If a picture paints a thousand words, think about what a video in a pull request or issue can do! Video uploads are now available to make it easier than ever to collaborate. Developers can share prototypes with their team, capture a walkthrough of the changes in a pull request, or demonstrate how to recreate a bug – now all in video.

GitHub Enterprise Server 3.2 brings new controls to compliance teams, too. Pull request auto-merge is now disabled when new changes are pushed. And a new branch protection rule makes it easier to highlight and resolve conversations in pull requests before merging changes, so your team’s feedback is never lost.

New GitHub Advanced Security capabilities

GitHub Advanced Security secret scanning now supports custom patterns (beta) in addition to the 100+ default patterns. Custom patterns can be defined at the repository, organization, and enterprise level.

And the security overview (beta) provides a new organization-level view of the application security risks detected by code scanning, Dependabot, and secret scanning.

Finally, dependency review (beta) helps reviewers and contributors understand dependency changes and their security impact at every pull request. This release also includes Go support for all our supply chain features, including Dependabot alerts.

A more secure home for development

GitHub Enterprise Server 3.2 helps companies keep their information more secure than ever before, with three major changes.

First up, companies can restrict which email addresses receive notification emails, using the new Approved and Verified Domains feature.

Developers can also now securely access GitHub using the industry’s most hardened security tools. They can authenticate SSH connections using a third-party security key, or take advantage of the Git Credential Manager to store their credentials for GitHub Enterprise Server for the first time ever.

Better continuous delivery with GitHub Actions

This release helps companies improve their continuous delivery workflows with the introduction of Environments, environment protection rules, and environment secrets in GitHub Actions.

Environment protection rules and environment secrets enable separation between deployment and development to help companies meet their compliance and security requirements. The “required reviewers” environment protection rule will automatically pause a job trying to deploy to the protected environment and notify the reviewers. Once approved, the job runs and is given secured access to the environment’s secrets.

The GitHub Actions workflow language has also been enhanced with a new environment keyword on the job node. Simply referencing the target environment name in this keyword causes the environment protection rules and secrets to be applied. In addition, there’s a complete history of deployments for each environment, so teams can see what version of their code is deployed.

Try it out today

To learn more about all the new features in GitHub Enterprise Server 3.2, read the GitHub Enterprise Server 3.2 release notes, or download it today.

Not using GitHub Enterprise Server already? Start a free trial to check out a better developer experience today.

September 10, 2021 update: We’ve removed a reference to personal access token expiration settings, which are due to ship in our GitHub Enterprise Server 3.3 release.

Written by

Maya Ross

@maya-ross