The GitHub Blog

We couldn’t be more excited to announce that all of our paid plans on GitHub.com now include unlimited private repositories. GitHub will always be free for public and open source projects, but starting today there are just two ways to pay for GitHub.com:

• Personal: $7/month
• Organization: $9/user/month, $25/month for your first five users

One of the very best things about Git and other distributed version control systems is the ability to create a new repository without asking permission or getting approval. While this has always been true for our public plans, it hasn’t been the case for individuals and teams working together in private. All that changes today.

If you’re new to GitHub, you can sign up to start using unlimited private repositories. If you’re already using GitHub.com, read on to learn how these changes will impact you.

Individual developers

If you’re using GitHub for private projects, now there’s just one paid plan—unlimited private repositories for $7/month. No matter what you were paying before, your plan now includes as many repositories as you need to work on projects in private—you can even invite collaborators.

Over the next few days, we will automatically move all paid accounts, from Micro to Large, to the new plan. If you’re currently paying for one of those larger plans, look out for a prorated credit on your account.

Organizations

If you’re currently paying for one of our organization plans, you’ll have the option to upgrade to unlimited private repositories at any time. For many of you, this change will mean immediate freedom from repository limits and a better way to grow and pay for GitHub.

We want everyone to have a plan with unlimited private repositories, but don’t worry—you are welcome to stay on your current plan while you evaluate the new cost structure and understand how to best manage your organization members and their private repository access. And while we're currently not enforcing a timeline to move, rest assured that you'll have at least 12 months notice before any mandated change to your plan.

A better way to work

We’ve heard from developers across our community that this new model is a better way to work. We agree—through years of building our business and developing GitHub for you, we've seen first hand the advantages of working without private repository limits. We hope you’ll create more repositories, write more code, and keep doing amazing things with GitHub.

As always, we’re here to help. Take a look at our new plans, learn how to update your personal or organization plan, or get in touch—we’d love to hear from you.

Frequently asked questions

For a paid organization on GitHub.com what kind of users will be charged?

You must purchase a seat for each user in your GitHub.com organization. These users fill a seat:

• Organization members and owners
• Pending invitations
• Outside collaborators with access to 1 or more private repositories

These users do not fill a seat:

• Outside collaborators with access to only public repositories
• Billing managers

Will GitHub force me to move to per-user pricing after 12 months?

No. At this time we are not enforcing a timeline to move and if in the future we do decide to set a timeline we are committing to giving you at least 12 months.

I am an existing organization customer and prefer the per-repository plans. Can I remain on my current plan?

Yes, you can choose to continue paying based on the number of repositories you use. You can also upgrade or downgrade in the legacy repository structure based on the number of repositories you need.

Can there be collaborators on private repositories for the personal plan?

Yes. A paid personal account allows you to invite collaborators directly to your private repositories. If you need more granular permissions beyond full access, an organization plan is recommended.

For two years, Electron has lowered the barrier to developing desktop applications—making it possible for developers to build cross-platform apps using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Now we’re excited to share a major milestone for Electron and for the community behind it. The release of Electron 1.0 is now available from electron.atom.io.

New to Electron? Electron is an open source framework that can help you build apps for Mac, Windows, and Linux. See how:

What’s new in Electron 1.0

Electron 1.0 comes with API stability and usability improvements, and makes it simpler than ever to explore and learn about Electron APIs with a new app, Electron API Demos. We’re also releasing and improving upon a couple tools that help developers along the way.

Read the full story on the Electron blog

Built on Electron

In just the last year, we’ve seen 1.2 million downloads and a growing community of hundreds of developers, open source maintainers, and companies who use the framework as the foundation of their apps. They’ve built everything from email, chat, and Git apps to SQL analytics tools, torrent clients, and robots. Take a tour of even more Electron apps to see what’s possible.

Electron 1.0 is the result of a community effort by hundreds of developers, building amazing things. Are you ready to build your first Electron app? Get started with our quick start guide—we can’t wait to see what you create.

Ensuring that your GitHub Pages site appears in search engines and is shareable via social media is now easier with the introduction of the Jekyll SEO Tag plugin.

By simply adding the {% seo %} tag to your site's template Jekyll will automatically add the appropriate search engine metadata to each page, including the page title, description, canonical URL, next and previous URLs for posts, and JSON-LD site and post metadata to help your site get properly indexed by search engines.

Additionally, the SEO tag plugin adds open graph and summary card metadata, ensuring properties like the title, description, and any featured images are displayed richly when your content is shared on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social networks.

While you've always been able to add the various metadata tags yourself, the plugin provides a battle-tested template of crowdsourced best-practices, which along with the Jekyll sitemap plugin, will help your site appear in major search engines.

For more information, see using Jekyll SEO Tag on GitHub Pages.

Happy Search Engine Optimizing!

GitHub Desktop on Windows is a nice complement to developer tools such as Atom and Visual Studio. Now it visually complements those tools too! The latest update adds the ability to select a new dark theme.

You can access this setting from the Options menu in GitHub Desktop.

GitHub Pages will upgrade to the soon-to-be-released Jekyll 3.1.4 on May 18th. The Jekyll 3.1.x branch brings significant performance improvements to the build process, adds a handful of helpful Liquid filters, and fixes a few minor bugs.

This should be a seamless transition for all GitHub Pages users, but if you have a particularly complex Jekyll site, we recommend building your site locally with the latest version of Jekyll 3.1.x prior to May 18th to ensure your site continues to build as expected.

For more information, see the Jekyll changelog and if you have any questions, we encourage you to get in touch with us.

You can now import repositories from Subversion, Mercurial, and TFS that include files larger than 100 MB using the GitHub Importer.

This new ability is powered by Git LFS. When the repository you are importing has files larger than 100 MB you can opt-in to using LFS to store those large files or opt-out and the files will simply be removed from your repository during the import.

You can learn more about our LFS feature and working with large files on our help site.

Back in February, we announced, that GitHub Pages would be dropping support for the RDiscount, Redcarpet, and RedCloth (Textile) markup engines, and today we're making it official.

For the vast majority of users, making the switch should be easy, as kramdown supports all of RDiscount and Redcarpet's most popular features. If you're making the transition from Textile, follow these instructions to upgrade your site to Markdown.

In standardizing on a single Markdown engine, we're able to simplify and improve the publishing experience, by removing much of the confusion and complexity associated with the differences between various markdown interpretations, bringing things more closely in line with what you'd expect from Markdown rendering on GitHub.com. See last month's blog post on the subject, for more context behind our decision.

If you're still using RDiscount, Redcarpet, or RedCloth, next time you push to your GitHub Pages site, you will receive an email from us with instructions on how to upgrade. We highly recommend you test building your site locally with kramdown prior to pushing. If you're a GitHub Enterprise user, this change will affect GitHub Enterprise versions 2.7 and later.

In most cases, upgrading to kramdown should be a matter of updating your site's configuration. If in the off chance you do run into any trouble, please get in touch with us, or if you have questions about what this change means for your GitHub Enterprise appliance, please contact GitHub Enterprise support. We're here to help.

Join the European developer community at GitHub Satellite in Amsterdam on May 11 to hear how organizations like Facebook, Heroku, GOV.UK, and Spotify are building software and contributing to open source. 

We’ll also share the latest on GitHub products and services, beginning with a keynote from GitHub CEO Chris Wanstrath. Check out talks from GitHub engineers and executives, including inside stories about projects like scaling GitHub, DevOps workflows, and Electron.

Presentations

• Scaling GitHub - A look at the technology behind the worlds largest code host
  Sam Lambert, Senior Director of Infrastructure
• Collaborating with Hubot for a more efficient DevOps workflow
  Brent Beer, Solutions Engineer
• Building cross-platform apps with Electron
  Jessica Lord, Electron Engineer

Panels

• Every company is a software company
  Led by Kakul Srivastava, VP of Product
• Open source maintainers
  Led by Brandon Keepers, Head of Open Source
  

Guests

To close out the day, GitHub's VP of Social Impact, Nicole Sanchez, will lead a session featuring the amazing stories of nonprofits Fred Hutch and Code to Inspire, which are using technology to pave the way to a more inclusive society and a healthier world.

Hands-on Help

While you're at Satellite, you can also get your Git and GitHub questions answered personally by experts from our Services team! Schedule your one-on-one session here.

Grab tickets now, before we sell out!

A new release of GitHub Enterprise is now available—and includes features requested by developers across the GitHub community. With GitHub Enterprise 2.6, we’re introducing tools and updates that will provide teams with even more options to create efficient, flexible, and friendly processes at every step of their development cycles.

All teams work differently, so it’s important that GitHub Enterprise supports the effort they put into creating efficient, effective tooling. In this release, administrators will find tools that save time throughout their development processes, including Issue templates and support for pre-receive hooks.

GitHub Enterprise 2.6 will also help teams have productive conversations. Developers can more efficiently review code and comments with new ways to view the history of their pull requests. And to make GitHub a better communication tool for all team members, we’ve added the option to drag and drop files into repositories using the GitHub interface and an editor to style issues and comments without markdown.

Ready to upgrade? Upgrade now.

Build a workflow that works for your team

The latest release adds features and support to help you and your team create even more tailored, efficient workflows. Administrators can now:

• Set up pre-receive hooks to enforce push policies and optimize their workflows before code lands on GitHub
• Create Issue and Pull Request templates to help teams add the right details at the right time
• Push output data from logs to multiple destinations with multiple log forwarding

Protect branches with greater flexibility

With more than 100,000 people pushing to nearly 300,000 Protected Branches every week, we've found a few ways to make them better. Administrators now have more flexibility over their Protected Branches with the option to merge out-of-date pull requests and set restrictions on which users and teams can merge branches. Check out the documentation to learn how.

Let your team know what's happening, fast

From GitHub Enterprise 2.6 onwards administrators can set up custom messages to share with developers on their GitHub Enterprise sign-in page. Administrators can also write custom messages for suspended users to appear when anyone with a suspended account tries to log in. See how you can use custom messages to communicate with your team.

Flexibly review pull requests

Effective code review catches bugs before they’re deployed, improves code consistency, and helps educate new developers. Since our last release, we've worked to make reviewing pull requests faster and more flexible. With GitHub Enterprise 2.6, you can:

• Quickly find files to review, and filter them by name or extension
• Filter changes by commit to see how a pull request has evolved through time
• Pick up where you left off, and view new changes to pull requests since your last visit

Choose how you commit

Shape your workflow however you like. The organization of your Git history is just one of the choices to make, but up until now the merge button on GitHub only created merge commits. Now you also have the option to squash merge—squashing all of your commits into a tidy, easy-to-digest history. Learn more about squash merging.

Communicate better across GitHub, across teams

To help everyone on your team share their ideas, we've added features to streamline feedback and open up your development process to even more team members. Your team can now:

• React to issues, comments, and pull requests with emoji
• Save time writing frequently used responses with canned replies
• Use a text formatting toolbar to style text in comments without learning markdown
• Drag and drop files into repositories using GitHub's interface, not the command line

Upgrade today

GitHub Enterprise 2.6 is driven by developer and community feedback and includes some of our most requested improvements. Upgrade today, so your team can start taking advantage of them. You can also check out the release notes to see what else is new or enable update checks to automatically update your instance whenever there is a new release.

Webhooks are one of the more powerful ways to extend GitHub. They allow internal tools and third-party integrations to subscribe to specific activity on GitHub and receive notifications (via an HTTP POST) to an external web server when those events happen. They are often used to trigger CI builds, deploy applications, or update external bug trackers.

Based on your feedback, we've expanded the kinds of events to which you can subscribe. New events include:

• Editing an issue or pull request's title or body
• Changing a repository's visibility to public or private
• Deleting a repository
• Editing an issue comment, pull request comment, or review comment
• Deleting an issue comment, pull request comment, or review comment

When the action in question was an edit, the webhook's payload will helpfully point out what changed.

These expanded webhook events are now available on GitHub.com. For more information, check out the developer blog and take a look at the documentation for a full list of webhook events.

A year ago, Jekyll sites on GitHub pages gained access to repository and organization metadata with the introduction of the site.github namespace.

We recently moved our own site.github implementation to use the community-driven GitHub metadata Jekyll plugin, meaning it's now easier to preview sites locally that rely on repository or organization metadata using the exact same process GitHub Pages uses to build your site in production.

To recreate the site.github namespace when previewing your site locally, assuming you're using the GitHub Pages gem, simply add the jekyll-github-metadata gem to your site's config:

gems:
 - jekyll-github-metadata

For more information on using repository and organization metadata, when previewing locally or on GitHub Pages, see the plugin and repository metadata documentation.

Technology has fundamentally changed the way people work. As businesses from every industry build more software, new challenges and opportunities arise. Join us at GitHub Satellite to glimpse how developers are using software to change the way their companies work.

GitHub's VP of Product Kakul Srivastava will host engineering leaders from some of Europe's best-known companies for a panel discussion. Hear from Tesco, Zalando, UBS, and KPN on why they’ve evolved their focuses on manufacturing, retail, finance, and telecomms to include significant investments in software development.

Meet the panel

Tesco Stores, Joshua Anderson, Technology Product Owner

Zalando, Eric Bowman, VP Engineering

UBS Thomas Sugden, Executive Director

KPN, Jerry Caupain, IT Architect

About the discussion

Championing modern development practices

The move to modern software development practices often starts with small projects championed by individual developers. During the panel, we’ll discuss the evolving role of the developer, how to advocate for change within your organization, and challenges for securing support from executives.

Trade secrets: tools, integrations, and organizational structures

This panel gives you a chance to peek behind the curtain of Europe’s leading companies to see how they organize teams and people around software, the tools they can’t live without, and the creative ways they integrate with GitHub.

From InnerSource to open source

No discussion on modern software development would be complete without an exploration of open source. We’ll ask panel participants about their strategies for organizing around, consuming, and contributing to open source software projects, and how it impacts their developers.

We're pleased to welcome an excellent lineup of speakers to GitHub Satellite, the first ever international event in the GitHub Universe conference series. On May 11, 2016, 500 people will converge in Amsterdam to learn how developers, founders, activists, and more create impactful technologies.

Check out sessions led by GitHub executives and engineers like CEO Chris Wanstrath, VP of Social Impact Nicole Sanchez, and Head of Open Source Brandon Keepers. We'll also feature talks from GitHub customers and partners, open source maintainers, and organizations who are building software for social good.

The GitHub Satellite program is organized into two tracks:

Discover:

The Discover track provides an introduction to the ideas, people and companies who are advancing the world through software, creating business transformation, or building the methodologies and practices that will drive software development into the future.

Develop:

The Develop track provides practical and tactical advice to developers seeking to implement modern software development practices, maintain or evolve open source projects and communities, and adopt best practices for scaling or building integrations for GitHub.

Check out the schedule and grab a ticket and we'll see you in Amsterdam.

CodeConf LA will converge June 27-29, 2016 in sunny Los Angeles for three days of unforgettable discussions.

We're searching for the best talks that the open source community has to offer. We'd like opinionated, thoughtful, and compelling sessions that will leave everyone that attends thinking differently about the open source ecosystem. This year’s event will focus on systems engineering projects, practices, and programs in the open source community. We are looking for a wide range of topics from all over the systems community, with topics ranging from systems programming practices to operating applications at scale.

We welcome speakers with all level of experience, whether it's your first talk or your fiftieth. We are also actively seeking a diverse line-up of speakers across all dimensions.

The call for proposals closes April 29, 2016 at 11:59pm PST. Please get in touch if you have any questions about the conference or the application process.

Stay hydrated while sharing your love for GitHub with the new water bottle. Available in the GitHub Shop