GitHub is home to thousands of software communities, from open source projects to enterprises, from small teams to the largest organizations. This year’s Satellite, GitHub’s first virtual conference, is all about giving communities tools to come together to solve the problems that matter to them and removing barriers that stand in their way.
Earlier this year, GitHub made GitHub free for teams to ensure cost isn’t a barrier for teamwork on GitHub. The company expanded GitHub Sponsors to more than 30 countries to help developers make a living from open source. GitHub launched GitHub for mobile, which has already helped hundreds of thousands of developers collaborate on the go. GitHub also brought npm to the GitHub family to support the largest developer ecosystem in the world.
This week, GitHub launched four new products to help all software communities work together:
- GitHub Codespaces
- A complete dev environment within GitHub that lets developers contribute immediately
- GitHub Discussions
- A new way for software communities to collaborate outside the codebase
- Code scanning and secret scanning
- Helping communities on GitHub produce and consume more secure code
- GitHub Private Instances
- Collaboration even for stringently regulated customers
“Thousands of communities live on GitHub and today’s announcements reaffirm our commitment to foster them, help remove barriers, and connect new communities. By introducing GitHub Codespaces, GitHub Discussions and GitHub Advanced Security features, we are making the entire software development supply chain more collaborative and secure, and bringing the development environment to wherever developers want to work,“ said Maneesh Sharma, General Manager, GitHub India.
“The pace of digital transformation in India demands for modern, reliable and secure cloud-based development toolchains. Enterprises rely on communities on GitHub to build and use software. With GitHub Private Instances, enterprises who are looking to modernize their software development environment with a secure cloud platform, can rely on the same platform that supports more than 50 million developers globally. I’m excited about continuing to support developers and organizations through their innovation journey,” Sharma added.
Start coding in seconds on GitHub with GitHub Codespaces
Available in limited public beta
Contributing code to a community can be hard. Every repository has its own way of configuring a dev environment, which often requires dozens of steps before developers can write any code. Even worse, sometimes the environment of two projects they are working on, conflict with one another. GitHub Codespaces gives developers a fully featured cloud-hosted dev environment that spins up in seconds, directly within GitHub, so they can start contributing to a project right away.
Codespaces can be configured by developers to load their code and dependencies, developer tools, extensions, and dotfiles. Switching between environments is simple—they can navigate away at any time, and when they switch back, their codespace is automatically reopened.
Codespaces in GitHub include a browser-based version of the full VS Code editor, with support for code completion and navigation, extensions, terminal access, and more. If they prefer to use their desktop IDE, developers will be able to start a codespace in GitHub and connect to it from your desktop.
Pricing for Codespaces has not been finalized, but code-editing functionality in the codespaces IDE will always be free. GitHub plans to offer simple pay-as-you-go pricing similar to GitHub Actions for computationally intensive tasks such as builds. During the beta, Codespaces is free.
