GitHub Universe 2020: What’s New and When You Get It

GitHub Universe kicked off its three-day virtual run on December 8th. The keynote stream was packed with platform updates spanning developer experience, CI/CD tooling, and enterprise deployments. Here’s a condensed rundown of the notable announcements and their roll-out timelines.

Corporate Sponsorships and Dark Mode Are Live

Two headline features are available starting today. First, GitHub Sponsors for companies lets organizations fund the open source maintainers and projects they depend on through their existing GitHub billing. Payments are accepted via credit card or PayPal, with additional payment options on a waitlist. Launch partners include American Express, AWS, Daimler, Stripe, New Relic, Indeed, Microsoft, and Substack.

Second, the long-requested dark mode setting is now in public beta. Users can enable it from the appearance settings or configure it to follow their system preference.

Smoother Pull Requests: Auto-Merge and Discussions

Auto-merge for pull requests enters public beta next week on public repositories, with availability for private repositories on Team and GitHub Enterprise Cloud plans. When enabled in repository settings, the feature automatically merges a pull request once all required reviews and status checks pass, removing the need for authors to babysit their open PRs.

The Discussions feature, previously in limited beta, is now available for all public repositories. The general release includes customizable categories, the ability to pin or transfer discussions, and conversion of issues into discussion threads. GitHub notes that mobile support for Discussions is coming soon.

Actions Gets Deployment Controls and Visualization

Several enhancements to GitHub Actions are aimed at continuous delivery workflows. Environments introduce deployment-specific protection rules and secrets, allowing teams to separate concerns between development and production to meet compliance needs. With required reviewers, jobs attempting to deploy to a protected environment are automatically paused until approval is granted, at which point the job gains secure access to that environment's secrets. Environment records also track deployment history—showing what version of code is running in an environment, when and why it was deployed, and past versions.

A new workflow visualization view maps Actions workflows and tracks their progress in real time. The graphs display workflow metadata and link directly to source code and deployment URLs, which helps teams troubleshoot failed runs and communicate status.

Protected environments, required reviewers, workflow visualization, deployments, and deployment logs are slated to enter public beta later this month for private repositories on GitHub Enterprise Cloud and all public repositories on GitHub.com.

Dependency Review: Catching Risks Before the Merge

Dependency review extends the existing dependency graph and security alerts further left in the development process. It surfaces within the pull request's Files Changed tab, providing a diff of dependency changes—what was added, removed, or updated—along with release dates, usage statistics, and known vulnerabilities. This gives reviewers the context to block a PR that would introduce vulnerable code.

The beta begins rolling out over the coming weeks to all public repositories and Advanced Security customers on GitHub Enterprise Cloud.

GitHub Enterprise Server 3.0 RC1: DevOps Goes On-Prem

GitHub has announced the release candidate for GitHub Enterprise Server 3.0, arriving in the next few weeks. The update brings Actions and Packages natively to self-hosted deployments, enabling teams to run CI/CD workflows within their own network.

Enterprise customers also get access to code scanning, now generally available for Enterprise Server. Built on CodeQL, it analyzes every push for security vulnerabilities and reports findings within pull requests. Secret scanning enters beta in 3.0, allowing organizations to detect hard-coded credentials like API keys in their repositories—a capability GitHub previously extended to private repositories on the cloud platform in May, which has seen adoption on more than 50,000 repos.

Server administrators also gain mobile support in beta, allowing developers to log in to their Enterprise Server instance from their phone or tablet.