Enterprises and organizations can display critical announcements

GitHub Enterprise Cloud admins can now display critical announcements to members of their enterprise or specific organizations. GitHub Enterprise Server already has this capability.

With this enhancement, Enterprise Cloud admins can display a critical message on all pages of their enterprise or in specific organizations. For example, you could announce a release cutoff date or an upcoming permission change. Announcements are displayed at the tops of pages as shown here:

An image showing how an announcement message appears on GitHub

To publish an announcement, you must be an enterprise owner or organization owner. Open your enterprise or organization settings and select Announcement. Enter your announcement message, an optional expiration when the announcement should be automatically unpublished, and select whether to allow users to dismiss the announcement when they see it. Click Publish announcement to publish it.

An image showing configuration of an announcement

For the best user experience, we recommend publishing only critical announcements and keeping the message brief to occupy less display space on each page. Link the message to a discussion for more context, guidance, and optional conversation. For non-critical messages or extended announcements, use a discussion instead.

For more details, see Customizing user messages for your enterprise in the GitHub Enterprise Cloud documentation.

Today, we are adding support for configuration variables in GitHub Actions 🎉

Previously, you needed to store this configuration data as encrypted secrets in order to reuse values in workflows.
While extremely secure, this method did not allow for easy storage and retrieval of non-sensitive configuration data such as compiler flags, usernames, server names etc.

Configuration variables allows you to store your non sensitive data as plain text variables that can be reused across your workflows in your repository or organization.
You can define variables at Organization, Repository or Environment level based on your requirement.

Configuration variables

Configuration variables can be accessed across the workflow using a new vars context.
The following example shows how configuration variables can be used in a workflow.

jobs:
  display-variables:
    runs-on: ${{ vars.RUNNER }}
    steps:
    - name: Use variables
      run: |
        echo "Repository variable : ${{ vars.REPOSITORY_VAR }}"
        echo "Organization variable : ${{ vars.ORGANIZATION_VAR }}"

Note: Variables feature is in public beta

Learn more about configuration variables

See more