Upgrades

GitHub Upgrade – 3.7.0/3.7.1

By Chris Deaton

The GitHub Service Team will be taking the GitHub Enterprise service down for maintenance on Monday, December 5th to upgrade to 3.7.1. The upgrade should not take longer than an hour, but additional details will be provided if the maintenance takes longer.

Some changes have been omitted from this article. Review the full changelog on the GitHub Enterprise Release Notes.

Features

Authentication

Dependabot

  • Users can see more information about the activity associated with a Dependabot alert. Within the details for a Dependabot alert, users can see a timeline of events, such as when the alert was opened, fixed, or reopened. Events will also show additional metadata when available, like relevant pull requests. For more information, see “About Dependabot alerts.”
  • Users’ Dependabot alerts are sorted by importance by default. Importance considers CVSS as the primary factor, as well as potential risk, relevancy, and ease of fixing the vulnerability. The calculation will improve over time.
  • Users can sort Dependabot alerts by the scope of the dependency, either runtime or development.
  • Users can optionally add a comment when dismissing a Dependabot alert. Dismissal comments appear in the event timeline and within the dismissComment field in the GraphQL API’s RepositoryVulnerabilityAlert object. For more information about the GraphQL API, see “Objects” in the GraphQL API documentation.
  • Users can select multiple Dependabot alerts, then dismiss or reopen the alerts. For example, from the Closed alerts tab, you can select multiple alerts that have been previously dismissed, and then reopen them all at once.
  • Organization owners on an instance can retrieve the enablement status or configure the automatic enablement of the following features for dependency management using the REST API.
    • Dependency graph
    • Dependabot alerts
    • Dependabot security updatesFor more information, see “Organizations” in the REST API documentation.

Code security

  • Enterprise and organization owners can see the security overview for the entire GitHub Enterprise Server instance or individual organizations on the instance. The security overview provides a centralized view of risk for application security teams, engineering leaders, and developers who work across many repositories. For more information, see “About the security overview.”
  • Organization owners can manage teams of security managers using the REST API. For more information, see “Security Managers” in the REST API documentation.
  • Users can take advantage of the following improvements to the GitHub Advisory Database.
    • The database displays advisories for for Elixir, Erlang’s Hex package manager, and more.
    • Users can find malware advisories by searching for type:malware.
    • The database displays advisories for GitHub Actions vulnerabilities.For more information, see “Browsing security advisories in the GitHub Advisory Database.”
  • Users can populate a repository’s dependency graph by submitting the dependencies for the repository using the REST API. The dependency graph powers Dependabot alerts and Dependabot security updates. For more information, see “Using the Dependency submission API.”

GitHub Actions

  • GitHub Actions users who use dependency caching to speed up workflows can now use the GitHub CLI to manage the GitHub Actions cache for a repository. To manage caches using the GitHub CLI, install the gh-actions-cache extension. For more information, see the gh-actions-cache documentation.
  • Workflow re-runs in GitHub Actions use the actor who initially triggered the workflow for privilege evaluation. The actor who triggered the re-run will continue to be displayed in the UI, and can be accessed in a workflow via the triggering_actor field in the github context. For more information, see “Re-running workflows and jobs” and “Contexts.”
  • Users can call reusable workflows from a matrix or other reusable workflows. For more information, see “Reusing workflows.”
  • When querying GitHub Actions for artifacts, the REST API returns information about the run and branch that produced the artifact. For more information, see “GitHub Actions Artifacts” in the REST API documentation.
  • To support secure cloud deployments at scale, organization owners and repository administrators can complete the following tasks with the OpenID Connect REST API. For more information, see “GitHub Actions OIDC” in the REST API documentation
    • Enable a standard OpenID Connect configuration across cloud deployment workflows by customizing the subject claim format.
    • Ensure additional compliance and security for OpenID Connect deployments by appending the issuer URL with the enterprise’s slug.
    • Configure advanced OpenID Connect policies by using additional OpenID Connect token claims like repository_id and repo_visibility.For more information, see “About security hardening with OpenID Connect.”
  • GitHub Actions users who use dependency caching to speed up workflows can now use the GitHub Actions Cache REST API to accomplish the following tasks.
  • If a non-ephemeral self-hosted GitHub Actions runner does not communicate with the GitHub Enterprise Server instance for more than 14 days, the instance will automatically remove the runner. If an ephemeral self-hosted runner does not communicate with the instance for more than one day, the instance will automatically remove the runner. Previously, GitHub Enterprise Server removed runners after 30 days. For more information, see “About self-hosted runners.”
  • GitHub Actions can run self-hosted macOS workflows in a macOS ARM64 runtime with runner support for Apple silicon, such as the M1 or M2 chip. For more information, see “Using self-hosted runners in a workflow.”

GitHub Pages

  • Users can deploy a GitHub Pages site directly from a repository using GitHub Actions, without configuration of a publishing source. Using GitHub Actions provides control over the authoring framework and version, as well as more control over the publishing process with features like deployment gates. For more information, see “Configuring a publishing source for your GitHub Pages site.”

Repositories

  • Enterprise owners can prevent users from creating repositories owned by their user accounts. For more information, see “Enforcing repository management policies in your enterprise.”
  • Enterprise owners can control where users can fork repositories. Forking can be limited to preset combinations of organizations, the same organization as the parent repository, user accounts, or everywhere. For more information, see “Enforcing repository management policies in your enterprise.”
  • Repository administrators can block potentially destructive pushes by limiting the number of branches and tags that can be updated by a single push. By default, there is no limit to the number of branches and tags that can be updated in a single push. For more information, see “Managing the push policy for your repository.”
  • Users can further customize the default commit message when squash-merging a pull request. For more information, see “Configuring commit merging for pull requests” and “Configuring commit squashing for pull requests.”
  • Users can create a branch from a repository’s Branches overview page by clicking the New branch button. For more information, see “Creating and deleting branches within your repository.”
  • Improvements have been made to the creation and management of forks.
    • When forking a repository, users can choose to only include the repository’s default branch in the fork.
    • Users can use a repository’s’ Fork button to see existing forks of the repository.
    • The Fetch upstream button has been renamed to Sync fork to better describe the button’s behavior. If the sync causes a conflict, the web UI prompts the user to contribute changes to the parent repository, discard changes, or resolve the conflict.
    • To address situations where people work within one organization and don’t want to fork a repository to a different organization or user account, users can fork a repository to the same organization as the parent repository.
    • Users can fork an internal repository to another organization and the fork will retain internal visibility. When forking an internal repository, users can choose which organization should own the fork.For more information, see “Fork a repo.”
  • Repository administrators can block the creation of branches that match a configured name pattern with the Restrict pushes that create matching branches branch protection rule. For example, if a repository’s default branch changes from master to main, a repository administrator can prevent any subsequent creation or push of the master branch. For more information, see “About protected branches” and “Managing a branch protection rule.”
  • Users can create files with geoJSON, topoJSON, and STL diagrams and render the diagrams in the web interface. For more information, see “Working with non-code files.”
  • Users can create autolink references using either alphanumeric or numeric identifiers. For more information, see “Configuring autolinks to reference external resources autolinks.”

Pull Requests, Issues

Markdown

  • Users can use Mermaid syntax when writing Markdown, which displays a diagram when rendering the Markdown. For more information, see “Creating diagrams.”
  • Users can write mathematical expressions using fenced code blocks with the math syntax in addition to the existing delimiters. $$ is not required with this method. For more information, see “Writing mathematical expressions.”
    • Note: This feature is unavailable in GitHub Enterprise Server 3.7. The feature will be available in an upcoming release. [Updated: 2022-11-16]
  • Users can render maps directly in Markdown using fenced code blocks with the geojson or topojson syntax, and embed STL 3D renders using stl syntax. For more information, see “Creating diagrams.”
  • In Markdown, users can write LaTeX-style syntax to render math expressions inline using $ delimiters, or in blocks using $$ delimiters. For more information, see “Writing mathematical expressions.”

Changes

  • When creating a new release, users can now submit the form using Ctrl + Enter in macOS, or Ctrl + Enter in Windows or Linux.
  • The Wiki tab in a repository only appears when a wiki exists. Previously, the tab always appeared.
  • Rendered wikis display mathematical expressions and Mermaid diagrams.
  • The size of the search field for user, organization, and enterprise audit logs has increased.
  • To improve stability, the service for rendering GeoJSON, Jupyter Notebook, PDF, PSD, SVG, SolidWorks, and other binary formats has been replaced.

Bug Fixes

  • If a GitHub Actions dependency uses a pinned SHA version, Dependabot will no longer mark the dependency as vulnerable.
  • GitHub Pages builds could time out on instances in AWS that are configured for high availability.
  • The audit log timestamp for Dependabot alert events returned the creation date of the alert instead of the timestamp when a user took action on the alert.
  • If a user named a status check with leading or trailing spaces, the instance created a duplicate check if another check existed with the same name and no leading or trailing spaces.
  • If a user configured a pre-receive hook for multiple repositories, the instances Hooks page would not always display the correct status for the hook.
  • In some cases, an instance could replace an active repository with a deleted repository.

Deprecations

  • Commit comments, which are comments that users add directly to a commit outside of a pull request, no longer appear in the pull request timeline. Users could not reply to or resolve these comments. The Timeline events REST API and the GraphQL API’s PullRequest object also no longer return commit comments.
  • Diffing GeoJSON, PSD, and STL files is no longer possible.