Today, we’re announcing that the ability to prebuild codespaces is entering general availability. A prebuilt codespace serves as a “ready-to-go” template where your source code, editor extensions, project dependencies, commands, and configurations have already been downloaded, installed, and applied so that new codespaces are available on-demand without any wait period. This helps significantly speed up codespace creations–especially for complex or large codebases.
With general availability, we’ve introduced a ‘prebuild in progress’ label in cases where a prebuild template creation is in progress to enable developers stay informed for when a given branch and machine type is ready for a fast codespace creation experience. Administrators now have more control on how often prebuild configurations are updated to manage Actions usage. They can also configure retention settings on prebuild templates to manage underlying storage costs. Additionally, with failure notifications, repository administrators can specify a set of individuals or teams to be informed via email in case a prebuild-associated workflow fails to help with efficient monitoring. Administrators can also temporarily pause a prebuild workflow run while fixing an underlying issue.
With general availability, organizations will be billed for Actions minutes required to run prebuild associated workflows and storage of templates associated with each prebuild configuration for a given repository and region. As an administrator, you can download the usage report for your organization to get a detailed view of prebuild associated Actions and storage costs for your organization-owned repositories.
Prebuilt codespaces are generally available for all GitHub Enterprise Cloud and Team organizations. Repository admins can head over to their repository’s settings page and create prebuild configurations under the Codespaces tab. Once set up, you can take advantage of fast codespace creation by selecting machine types with the ‘prebuild ready’ tag.
Check out the prebuilds documentation to get started!
GitHub's Advisory Database now supports listing malware advisories. You can see them by searching "type:malware" on https://github.com/advisories.
If you have enabled Dependabot alerts on your repositories, GitHub will send Dependabot alerts for malware automatically. Note that Dependabot does not send update pull requests for malware as the only resolution is to delete the package and find an alternative.
This beta feature allows repository admins to block Git pushes to a repository when they are potentially destructive.
Developers have had branches deleted from their repository when someone pushes changes with Git's --mirror option. The --mirror option is potentially destructive because it makes the remote repository exactly match the local clone. When run by accident, if the remote has more branches or different data than the local clone, many branch deletes and force-pushes can happen at the remote without any warning. This is often embarrassing for the one who pushed and a big challenge to recover from. Here's a real-world example: git push origin –mirror deleted all of my colleagues' branches.
This destructive situation can usually be identified by multiple branch or tag updates being pushed at the same time. The new beta feature being announced here allows admins to block potentially destructive pushes by limiting the number of branches and tags that can be updated by a single push. This can prevent or limit the loss of data.
To use this beta feature, click Settings in a repository that you are an admin of. Next, select General (the default, top-most tab). Then toggle the setting named Limit how many branches and tags can be updated in a single push as shown below. Set the number appropriately for your needs. We recommend the default maximum of 5 branch or tag updates allowed in one push. The minimum value is 2 since two branch updates are required by Git to rename a branch in a single push: delete branch and create branch. Lower numbers are more restrictive of which pushes are allowed, and higher numbers are less restrictive but have more potential for being destructive. As part of this feature's beta, we'd like to learn which number works best for you.
We appreciate feedback on this and other topics in GitHub's public feedback discussions.