Engineering

Over the course of a year, GitHub’s engineers make millions of commits across all of our internal repositories, process billions of API requests, and run tens of thousands of deployments across the internal apps that power GitHub’s services. We use many of GitHub’s products and plenty of other open source tools to operate at this scale. Here’s an inside look into how we do it.

An illustration of two octocats repairing a robot.

Engineering

Transit and Peering: How your requests reach GitHub

GitHub is at a scale that provides exposure to interesting aspects of running a major site and are working to mature and level-up many parts of our infrastructure as we…

Engineering

Evolution of GitHub’s data centers

Over the past 18 months we’ve made a significant investment in GitHub’s physical infrastructure. The goal of this work is to improve the redundancy and global availability of our system.…

Engineering

Kubernetes at GitHub

Over the last year, GitHub has gradually evolved the infrastructure that runs the Ruby on Rails application responsible for github.com and api.github.com. We reached a big milestone recently: all web…

Engineering

Topic Suggestions for Millions of Repositories

We recently launched Topics, a new feature that lets you tag your repositories with descriptive words or phrases, making it easy to discover projects and explore GitHub.com. Topic suggestions on…

Engineering

Soft U2F

In an effort to increase the adoption of FIDO U2F second factor authentication, we’re releasing Soft U2F: a software-based U2F authenticator for macOS. We’ve long been interested in promoting better…

Engineering

MySQL infrastructure testing automation at GitHub

Our MySQL infrastructure is a critical component to GitHub. MySQL serves GitHub.com, GitHub’s API, authentication and more. Every git request touches MySQL in some way. We are tasked with keeping…

Engineering

DNS Infrastructure at GitHub

At GitHub we recently revamped how we do DNS from the ground up. This included both how we interact with external DNS providers and how we serve records internally to…

Architecture & optimization

How Four Native Developers Wrote An Electron App

Today we released the new GitHub Desktop Beta, rewritten on Electron.Electron is a well-known on-ramp for web developers to build desktop apps using familiar web technologies: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Engineering

Enabling DNS split authority with OctoDNS

Building robust systems involves designing for failure. As Site Reliability Engineers at GitHub, we’re always on the lookout for places where redundancy can help to mitigate problems, and today we’ll…

Engineering

A formal spec for GitHub Flavored Markdown

We’re releasing a formal specification of the syntax for GitHub Flavored Markdown, and its corresponding reference implementation.

Engineering

Discontinue support for weak cryptographic standards

Cryptographic standards are ever evolving. It is the canonical game of security cat and mouse, with attacks rendering older standards ill-suited, and driving the community to develop newer and stronger…

Engineering

A glimpse into GitHub’s Bug Bounty workflow

Last month, we announced the third anniversary of our Bug Bounty Program. While there’s still time to disclose your findings through the program, we wanted to pull back the curtain…

Engineering

GitHub’s post-CSP journey

Last year we shared some details on GitHub’s CSP journey. A journey was a good way to describe it, as our usage of Content Security Policy (CSP) significantly changed from…

Engineering

Moving persistent data out of Redis

Historically, we have used Redis in two ways at GitHub: We used it as an LRU cache to conveniently store the results of expensive computations over data originally persisted in…

Engineering

Orchestrator at GitHub

GitHub uses MySQL to store its metadata: Issues, Pull Requests, comments, organizations, notifications and so forth. While git repository data does not need MySQL to exist and persist, GitHub’s service…