Top GitHub Features You Probably Don’t Know
GitHub is a website and cloud-based service that helps developers store, manage, track and control changes to their code.
Below you will find some of the features for GitHub that you might not know!
Working better with automation
GitHub Actions was launched at the end of 2019 and is already the most popular CI/CD service on GitHub. The GitHub team has continued adding features and improving ways for you to automate common tasks in your repository. GitHub Actions is so much more than simply CI/CD. GitHub community has really stepped up to help you automate all the things with over 6,500 open source Actions available in the GitHub Marketplace.
Some of the enhancements to GitHub Actions in 2020 include:
Workflow visualization
GitHub made it easy for you to see what’s happening with your Actions automation. With Workflow visualization, you can now see a visual graph of your workflow.
This workflow visualization allows you to easily view and understand your workflow, no matter how complex it is. You can also track the progress of your workflow in real-time and easily monitor what’s happening so you can access deployment targets.
On top of the workflow visualization, you can also create workflow templates. This makes it easier to promote the best practices and consistency across your organization. It also cuts down the time when using the same or similar workflows. You can even define rules for these templates that work across your repo.
GitHub Discussions
Issues are a great place to talk about feature updates and bug fixes, but what about when you want to have an open-ended conversation or have your community help to answer common questions?
GitHub Discussions is a place for you and your community to come together and collaborate, chat, or discuss something in a separate space, away from your issues. Discussions allow you to have threaded conversations. You can even convert Issues to Discussions, mark questions as answered, categorize your topics, and pin your Discussions. These features help you provide a welcoming space to new people as well as quick access to the most common discussion points.
GitHub Sponsors
GitHub Team launched GitHub Sponsors in 2019, and people have been loving this program. It’s a great way to contribute to open-source projects. In 2020, GitHub Sponsors became available in even more countries. Last year, GitHub Sponsors became available in Mexico, Czech Republic, Malta, and Cyprus.
GitHub team also added some other fancy features to GitHub Sponsors. This includes the ability to export a list of your sponsors. You can also set up webhooks for events in your sponsored account and easily keep track of everything that’s happening via your activity feed.
GitHub Universe also announced Sponsors for Companies. This means that organizations can now invest in open-source projects via their billing arrangement with GitHub. Now is a great time to consider supporting your company’s most critical open-source dependencies.
Convert pull requests to drafts
Draft pull requests are a great way to let your team know you are working on a feature. It helps start the conversation about how it should be built without worrying about someone thinking it’s ready to merge into the main. GitHub recently made it easy to convert an existing PR into a draft anytime.
Dark Mode
Choose how GitHub looks to you. Select a single theme, or sync with your system and automatically switch between day and night themes.
Creating a folder via the Web Interface
It is possible to create a new folder from the web interface, but it would require you to have at least one file within the folder when creating it.
