GitHub Enterprise Server 3.11: A Focus on Code Security and Visibility
GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES) 3.11 has reached general availability. The release centers on expanding security capabilities for application testing, secret management, and organizational analytics. Key additions include a repository Activity view and a GitHub CLI extension for instance management.
Repository Oversight and Management from the Command Line
A new repository Activity view simplifies tracking changes such as pushes, merges, force pushes, and tag modifications. Users can quickly locate events like a force push on a specific branch and compare the repository state before and after. The view is supported by the gh-es extension for GitHub CLI, which provides command-line access to the Manage GitHub Enterprise Server API. This lets administrators triage their instances without needing a direct connection.
Application Security Testing at Scale
The default setup for code scanning now supports weekly automated scanning to help teams prevent, detect, and fix vulnerabilities across large codebases. New configuration support will automatically apply the optimal setup when languages change, and repository-level enablement allows organizations to turn on scanning for all eligible repositories in a few clicks. New analytics in security overview surface metrics such as the total secrets intercepted, the number successfully blocked versus bypassed, and the most commonly intercepted patterns.
Expanded Secret Detection and Security Analytics
Secret scanning coverage now includes GitHub Issues, detecting tokens in titles, bodies, and comments. This extension also recognizes custom patterns defined at the repository, organization, or enterprise level.
To better understand enterprise-wide posture, security overview adds two new views. The coverage view shows the enablement status of security features across all repositories, filterable by team, repository, or testing type. A complementary risk view inventories all alerts with counts and percentages of vulnerable repositories, filterable by severity and other criteria.
REST API Enhancements for Administrators
Three updates improve access to instance data via the REST API. Developers can now retrieve global security advisories from the GitHub Advisory Database programmatically. Additionally, a new x-accepted-github-permissions response header is sent to callers using the fine-grained permission model, indicating the permissions required to call a specific endpoint. The new gh-es CLI extension ties these together, offering command-line access to the endpoints of the Manage GitHub Enterprise Server API.
GitHub Enterprise Server 3.11 is available for download now. The release notes provide further detail on all features and changes.
