A Fresh Look and Stronger Defenses in GitHub Enterprise Server 3.2
GitHub Enterprise Server 3.2 has arrived as a release candidate, bringing more than 70 new features and changes. The focus is split between polish for daily development workflows and deeper security tooling for organizations. As with any release candidate, GitHub recommends testing it on non-production environments first.
Developer Experience Upgrades
Dark and dimmed themes, two of GitHub's most requested interface options, are now available on Enterprise Server. Beyond aesthetics, they offer a practical benefit by reducing eye strain during long stretches of work.
Collaboration also gets a richer medium with video uploads in pull requests and issues. Developers can now attach a recording to showcase a prototype, walk through changes in a pull request, or demonstrate how to reproduce a bug without leaving the platform.
Compliance teams gain more control over the merge workflow with two notable changes. Auto-merge is now disabled when new changes are pushed to a branch, and a new branch protection rule allows teams to require that conversations in pull requests be resolved before merging.
Advanced Security at Scale
GitHub Advanced Security adds flexible scanning with secret scanning custom patterns, now in beta. In addition to the 100+ default patterns, custom patterns can be defined at the repository, organization, or enterprise level.
A new organization-level security overview, also in beta, aggregates application security risks identified by code scanning, Dependabot, and secret scanning into a single view.
Two other security features arrive in beta. Dependency review helps contributors assess dependency changes and their security impact on every pull request. Supply chain features now include Go support, with Dependabot alerts covering the language as well.
Tightening the Development Environment
Three changes make the Enterprise Server environment more secure. Organizations can now restrict which email addresses receive notifications through an approved and verified domains feature. SSH access can be protected with third-party security keys, and Git Credential Manager support is now available for GitHub Enterprise Server, giving developers a secure way to store credentials.
Gating Deployments with Actions Environments
Continuous delivery workflows get a boost with the introduction of Environments, environment protection rules, and environment secrets in GitHub Actions. These features create a separation between development and deployment, which helps organizations meet compliance requirements.
The "required reviewers" environment protection rule automatically pauses deployment jobs to protected environments and notifies the designated reviewers. Once approved, the job runs with access to the environment's secrets.
A new environment keyword is added to the job node in the Actions workflow language. Referencing the target environment's name applies that environment's protection rules and secrets automatically. Each environment also maintains a full deployment history, so teams can always see which version of their code is live.
Getting Started
Full details on every change are available in the GitHub Enterprise Server 3.2 release notes. Enterprises can download the release candidate directly, or start a free trial to evaluate the platform.
