GitHub Issues & Projects – December 14th update

Today's changelog brings you the general availability (GA) of organization project templates.

🎨 Organization project templates

We've shipped exciting updates that allow you to quickly create, share, and use project templates for your organizations, making it easy to get started with a new project and share inspiration and best practices with others.

🔄 Creating a project template

You can create a project template a few different ways:

  1. Using New template from the "Templates" section found in your organization, team, or repository "Projects" pages
  2. Converting a project to a template by toggling Make template from the project settings page
  3. Making a copy of an existing project or project template

templates section on the Projects index page

Once you set up your project template, any views, fields, workflows, insights, and draft items will be included when using the template or making a copy of it.

With a growing number of project templates within an organization, organization administrators can designate a set of recommended templates from the organization settings page. These will appear as "Recommended" templates when creating a new project, so they are surfaced more prominently to help guide you in the right direction when getting started.

organization recommended templates

➕ Improved experience when creating a project

When you create a new project, you'll notice an improved experience to browse and search across all available templates and choose one to quickly get started. You will find a new set of "Featured" templates provided by GitHub to help you get started depending on your use case for a project, such as the "Team planning" or "Feature release" templates, as well as separate sections for templates from your organization and starting from scratch.

✍️ Tell us what you think!

Join the conversation in the community discussion to share your feedback.

See how to use GitHub for project planning with GitHub Issues, check out what's on the roadmap, and learn more in the documentation.

GitHub Actions – Artifacts v4 is now Generally Available

We listened to your feedback and released new versions (v4) of actions/upload-artifact and actions/download-artifact. While this version of the artifact actions includes up to 10x performance improvements and several new features, there are also key differences from previous versions that may require updates to your workflows.

  • Artifacts will be scoped to a job rather than a workflow. This allows the artifact to become immediately available to download from the API after being uploaded, which was not possible before.
  • Artifacts v4 is not cross-compatible with previous versions. For example, an artifact uploaded using v3 cannot be used with actions/download-artifact@v4.
  • Using upload-artifact@v4 ensures artifacts are immutable, improving performance and protecting objects from corruption, which would often happen with concurrent uploads. Artifacts should be uploaded separately and then downloaded into a single directory using the two new inputs, pattern and merge-multiple, available in download-artifact@v4. These objects can then be re-uploaded as a single artifact.
  • A single job can upload a maximum of 500 artifacts.

Customers will still be able to use v1 – v3 of the artifact actions. If you wish to upgrade your workflow to use v4, please carefully consider the impact the aforementioned major version changes will have on your project and any downstream dependencies.

Artifacts v4 is only available to GitHub.com customers today but we will be extending support to GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES) customers in the future.

To learn more about what is included in v4, visit the actions/upload-artifact and actions/download-artifact repositories.

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New Markdown extension: Alerts provide distinctive styling for significant content

A screenshot of the five available types of Markdown alerts

Alerts are a Markdown extension displayed with distinctive colors and icons to indicate the significance of the content. Five different types of alerts are supported:

  • Note: Useful information that users should know, even when skimming content.
  • Tip: Helpful advice for doing things better or more easily.
  • Important: Key information users need to know to achieve their goal.
  • Warning: Urgent info that needs immediate user attention to avoid problems.
  • Caution: Advises about risks or negative outcomes of certain actions.

Learn more about how to use them within your Markdown content in the documentation.

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