GitHub Copilot Enterprise – March 2024 update

GitHub Copilot Enterprise banner

It’s been a little over a month since GitHub Copilot Enterprise became generally available. Check out what’s new below!

Enhanced contextual understanding and more relevant suggestions in GitHub.com

Copilot Chat in GitHub.com now uses faster and smarter embedding models to power content retrieval, giving Copilot higher quality and more relevant context when searching code and knowledge bases.

Copilot Chat in GitHub.com now knows about the programming languages used in the repository you’re looking at: Copilot could sometimes give answers based on a programming language not used by your project. Copilot now knows what programming languages a repository uses, so it can give code examples more tailored to your context.

Faster help with understanding pull request changes

It’s now easier to ask Copilot about the changed files in a diff: From the files changed view, you can now pick the files you’re most interested in asking Copilot about.

GitHub Copilot in Pull Request files changed view

You can also now ask Copilot about specific lines in a diff more easily by clicking on the Copilot icon when you hover on a line of code.

GitHub Copilot icon when hovering on a line in a diff

Usability improvements

A big thank you to all of our customers for the great feedback you’ve been providing. We’ve made a whole bunch of small fixes, including:

You can now start typing your next question to Copilot while the current response is still generating: Previously you had to wait for Copilot’s message to complete generating before a follow-up question could be composed.

Keyboard up/down arrows can now be used to cycle through past messages: Perhaps you want to ask a similar question from earlier in the conversation history? Hitting the up key on your keyboard will now enable you to cycle through previous messages.

Copilot Chat in GitHub.com now has better support for Japanese and Chinese characters: Previously the message could be submitted to Copilot after the IME conversion selection but before the user was ready to send the message to Copilot.

Customers desire clear, relevant, and actionable insights about how Actions workflows are being used in their organization. Today, we are thrilled to announce that Actions Usage Metrics is available in public beta for GitHub Enterprise Cloud plans.

Actions Usage Metrics screenshot

Time is the most important metric for DevOps and DevEx teams. The question they want answered is, “where are all my minutes going?” Actions Usage Metrics addresses this question and others by focusing on minutes used per workflow, job, repository, runtime OS, and runner type. This data helps organizations locate areas of improvement in their software delivery lifecycle, saving time and money.

Customers can filter data by any combination of workflows, jobs, repositories, runtime OS, and runner type to view total minutes, number of jobs, workflow executions, and more. All usage metrics, filtered or not, can be downloaded as a .csv file to use with your tool of choice.

By default, organization owners can access Actions Usage Metrics. However, access permissions can be granted to other members or teams using Actions fine-grained permissions. This ensures the right level of access to Actions Usage Metrics data, enabling informed decisions and improvements.

To learn more about Actions Usage Metrics, check out our docs or head to our community discussion.

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Dependabot grouped security updates are now generally available. This feature automatically groups Dependabot pull requests, lets you specify several additional options to fine tune your groupings.

You can enable grouped security updates for Dependabot at the repository or organization-level. To enable this feature, go to your repository or organization settings page, then go to the Code security and analysis tab, and click “Enable” for grouped security updates (this also requires each affected repository to enable Dependency graph, Dependabot alerts, and Dependabot security updates). When you enable this feature, Dependabot will collect all available security updates in a repository and attempt to open one pull request with all of them, per ecosystem, across directories.

If you would like more granular control over Dependabot’s grouping, you can also configure the dependabot.yml file in a repository to group by any of the following:

  • Package name
  • Dependency type (production vs development)
  • Semver update level (patch, minor, major)

For additional information, check out the Dependabot configuration file documentation.

For GitHub Enterprise Server users, grouped security updates will be available in Version 3.14.

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