GitHub Enterprise 2.6 is here with faster, more approachable workflows

A new release of GitHub Enterprise is now available—and includes features requested by developers across the GitHub community. With GitHub Enterprise 2.6, we’re introducing tools and updates that will provide teams with even more options to create efficient, flexible, and friendly processes at every step of their development cycles.

All teams work differently, so it’s important that GitHub Enterprise supports the effort they put into creating efficient, effective tooling. In this release, administrators will find tools that save time throughout their development processes, including Issue templates and support for pre-receive hooks.

GitHub Enterprise 2.6 will also help teams have productive conversations. Developers can more efficiently review code and comments with new ways to view the history of their pull requests. And to make GitHub a better communication tool for all team members, we’ve added the option to drag and drop files into repositories using the GitHub interface and an editor to style issues and comments without markdown.

Ready to upgrade? Upgrade now.

Build a workflow that works for your team

The latest release adds features and support to help you and your team create even more tailored, efficient workflows. Administrators can now:

• Set up pre-receive hooks to enforce push policies and optimize their workflows before code lands on GitHub
• Create Issue and Pull Request templates to help teams add the right details at the right time
• Push output data from logs to multiple destinations with multiple log forwarding

Protect branches with greater flexibility

With more than 100,000 people pushing to nearly 300,000 Protected Branches every week, we’ve found a few ways to make them better. Administrators now have more flexibility over their Protected Branches with the option to merge out-of-date pull requests and set restrictions on which users and teams can merge branches. Check out the documentation to learn how.

Let your team know what’s happening, fast

From GitHub Enterprise 2.6 onwards administrators can set up custom messages to share with developers on their GitHub Enterprise sign-in page. Administrators can also write custom messages for suspended users to appear when anyone with a suspended account tries to log in. See how you can use custom messages to communicate with your team.

Flexibly review pull requests

Effective code review catches bugs before they’re deployed, improves code consistency, and helps educate new developers. Since our last release, we’ve worked to make reviewing pull requests faster and more flexible. With GitHub Enterprise 2.6, you can:

• Quickly find files to review, and filter them by name or extension
• Filter changes by commit to see how a pull request has evolved through time
• Pick up where you left off, and view new changes to pull requests since your last visit

Choose how you commit

Shape your workflow however you like. The organization of your Git history is just one of the choices to make, but up until now the merge button on GitHub only created merge commits. Now you also have the option to squash merge—squashing all of your commits into a tidy, easy-to-digest history. Learn more about squash merging.

Communicate better across GitHub, across teams

To help everyone on your team share their ideas, we’ve added features to streamline feedback and open up your development process to even more team members. Your team can now:

• React to issues, comments, and pull requests with emoji 🎉
• Save time writing frequently used responses with canned replies
• Use a text formatting toolbar to style text in comments without learning markdown
• Drag and drop files into repositories using GitHub’s interface, not the command line

Upgrade today

GitHub Enterprise 2.6 is driven by developer and community feedback and includes some of our most requested improvements. Upgrade today, so your team can start taking advantage of them. You can also check out the release notes to see what else is new or enable update checks to automatically update your instance whenever there is a new release.

Written by

Matt Colyer

@mcolyer