Welcome to the latest edition of Release Radar, where we share the projects popping up on our radar—from world-changing technologies to weekend side projects from this past November. Most importantly, they’re all projects shipped by you.

eDEX-UI i 1.0

Do you ever wish that using your computer was a little less Office Space and a little more Tron? Then eDEX-UI 1.0 was made for you, providing a terminal loaded with movie-inspired graphs, maps, and a touch-screen keyboard.

Learn more from the release notes

HTTPie 1.0

HTTPie is a command-line tool that helps you interact with web servers. It’s like a super-powered curl with colorized output, JSON formatting, and persistent sessions. With its latest release, HTTPie has joined the 1.0 club! This version adds an automatic default color scheme, future-proofing for TLS 1.3, and so much more.

Learn more from the release notes

Did you know? The Hypertext Transfer Protocol reached 1.0 in 1996.

HTTP Prompt 1.0

HTTP Prompt, an interactive HTTP client, (and companion to HTTP Pie) is also celebrating a 1.0 release. HTTP Prompt helps you explore and debug APIs with autocompletion, OpenAPI specification integration, and automatic cookie handling. With version 1.0, HTTP Prompt adds support for the HTTP CONNECT method, a command to clear the screen, and some bug fixes.

Learn more from the release notes

SVGR 4.0

SVGR is a tool that helps you turn SVGs into React components. The SVGR 4.0 release promises to be “lighter, better, faster, stronger,” all while sporting a new engine and bug fixes.

Take an example SVG and run it through SVGR:

$ npx @svgr/cli --icon --replace-attr-values "#063855=currentColor" icon.svg

import React from 'react'
const SvgComponent = props => (
  <svg width="1em" height="1em" viewBox="0 0 48 1" {...props}>
    <path d="M0 0h48v1H0z" fill="currentColor" fillRule="evenodd" />
  </svg>
)

export default SvgComponent

Learn more from the release notes

svgedit 4.0

SVG-edit is a browser-based SVG drawing tool created with JavaScript to help unleash the inner artist in all of us. And it just reached the 4.0 milestone. In this release, SVG-edit has migrated several APIs from using callbacks to Promises.

Learn more from the release notes

Did you know? SVG-edit has a nifty live demo so you can get drawing right away.

buku 4.0

Buku is a private, local tool to help you store and manage your bookmarks from the command line. 4.0 must’ve been an auspicious number in November, because Buku 4.0 features new keyboard commands searching and opening bookmarks, enhanced clipboard support (for tools like Screen and tmux), and bug fixes.

Learn more from the release notes

Did you know? There are more tools in the Buku ecosystem, like a web interface, a browser extension, and more.

Pelican 4.0

Pelican is a static site generator that helps you turn your reStructuredText, Markdown, or AsciiDoc into HTML you can host most anywhere (including GitHub Pages, if you were so inclined). Pelican had a 4.0 release in November that adds a bunch of new features, such as draft status for pages, new signals for extending Pelican, settings to help translating sites, and much more. And we get it 4.0: you’ve had a big month.

Learn more from the release notes

Did you know? The distinctive, stretchy skin beneath a pelican’s bill is called a “gular pouch.” The birds use them to catch fish.

Filament 1.0

Filament is a cross-platform physically based rendering engine that can render materials in an impressive and realistic-looking way. Filament has just reached version 1.0. This release adds iOS support, expands the documentation for JavaScript, and fixes bugs.

Learn more from the release notes

Alda 1.0

Sing along if you know the words: ♩ ♬ Alda is a programming language for making music! ♪ ♫ Alda has recently released version 1.0, though it’s no mere humble beginning. Alda is already a capable language that can generate MIDI instrument sounds from source files or through an interactive REPL. You can learn more about the origins of Alda from this blog post by Alda’s creator. :metal: Here’s what the syntax looks like:

(tempo! 90)
(quant! 95)

piano:
  o5 g- > g- g-/f > e- d-4. < b-8 d-2 | c-4 e- d- d- <b-1/>g-

flute:
  r2 g-4 a- b-2. > d-32~ e-16.~8 < b-2 a- g-1

Learn more from the changelog

Kaku 2.0

Kaku streams music from web sources like YouTube, SoundCloud, as well as Vimeo on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Kaku recently released version 2.0, which features improved automatic updates thanks to several internal updates and changes to the project’s build process.

Learn more from the release notes

CMS.js 2.0

CMS.js turns your Markdown-formatted content into a single-page web application that doesn’t require any server-side code. The project is “in the spirit of Jekyll” and plays nicely with static-file hosting, much like GitHub Pages. Version 2.0 adds a host of new features, like tagging, search, and some smart-looking themes.

Learn more from the release notes

That’s just a handful of releases you shipped last month—keep them coming! If you’ve got a release that should be on our radar, send us a note.

Sometimes the smallest ships have the biggest impact. With 2018 coming to a close, we’re providing a round-up of what we shipped and what you may have missed, both big and small. We didn’t include every launch of the year (that would make for a very long read), but we did recap this year’s most loved ships.

Collaboration

The developer community is at the heart of GitHub. It’s where new developers get started, where experienced developers expand their knowledge, and where all developers work together. As the number of software developers worldwide continues to increase, the opportunities for collaboration increase as well. We strive to build experiences that make it as easy and intuitive as possible for all developers to do their best work. Here are some ships that make collaboration on GitHub even better:

• Suggested changes: Quickly make and incorporate suggestions, like fixing typos or changing code, during the pull request review process.

• Watch releases: Limit repository notifications exclusively to releases. Receive notifications when new releases are published in a repository without receiving notifications about other updates and conversations.

• Move issues from one repo to another: Repository admins can move issues across repositories and place them where they belong.

• Related issues: When you create a new issue, you’ll see a list of all related issues in your repository, so you can avoid opening a duplicate issue.

• Commit co-authors: See who has contributed to every commit, regardless of how many contributors there are. Every author gets attribution in the pull request and in their contribution graph.

• Hovercards: Hover over a contributor’s avatar to get an overview of their profile, what teams they belong to in your organization, if they are a code owner, if they’re making their very first pull request, and more.

• New tools for open source maintainers: We released a few new tools in 2018 to make the lives of open source maintainers a little easier.

• Saved replies keyboard shortcuts: It’s now even easier to use saved replies with keyboard shortcuts.

• Label improvements: Now you can add emojis when words just aren’t enough, add descriptions for more context, search through your labels, and preview how your label will look while editing.

• Profile activity overview: The new activity feed allows you to easily show off contributions you make. In addition to filtering your contributions by calendar year, you can now filter by organization and see where you contributed over your time on GitHub.

• Save a notification for later: Bookmark any notification to move it into a prioritized list.

• Issue and pull request templates: Issue templates better support automation and standardization. Automate assignees, labels, and even suggest issue titles. You can also add more than one issue and pull request template to get the right information from the start.

• Improvements to projects: Projects got a lot better in 2018. From automation and UX improvements to enhanced permissions capabilities, projects are better than ever. Updates include:

  • Project automation for reviewer status
  • Project board issue detail view
  • Project automation and template changes
  • Copying project boards
  • Archive cards in project boards
  • Project process tracking
  • Improved project permissions
  • Templates and copying for new projects

Business

This year, there are new ways for businesses to stay secure, keep developers learning, and increase collaboration across their organizations.

• Learning Lab: Learning Lab is an interactive, bot-driven learning experience for developers learning Git, GitHub, and software development skills and workflows—now customizable to specific workflows and scalable across organizations. With recent updates, organizations can create custom courses specific to their own workflows, policies, and growth paths, so developers can continue to level up their skills on the GitHub Platform.

• GitHub Enterprise 2.12-2.15: GitHub Enterprise saw three major releases this year, with our latest 2.15 version that was released at GitHub Universe. The start of the show for 2.15’s release was GitHub Connect, meant to unify the developer experience across different organizations and deployment types.

• GitHub Connect: GitHub Connect breaks down organizational barriers, unifies the experience across deployment types, and brings the power of the world’s largest open source community to teams at work. With GitHub Connect, companies can enjoy the scalability and ease-of-use of our cloud offering with the control of on-premises.

Platform

Developers should be able to choose the tools that are right for them, and it’s our job to make this as easy as possible by keeping GitHub’s platform and ecosystem open. In 2018 we doubled down on this commitment by releasing new integrations, APIs, and improved versions of well-loved platform products. Here’s our top platform ships of the year:

• GitHub Actions: Build, connect, execute, and share code to customize your software development workflow with GitHub Actions. Easily package, release, update, monitor, and deploy your project, in any language—on GitHub or any external system—without having to run code yourself.

• Google Cloud Build: Create fast, consistent, reliable builds across all languages. Easily set up CI through Cloud Build and automate builds and tests as part of your GitHub workflow.

• Microsoft Azure Pipelines: Configure a CI/CD pipeline for any Azure application using your preferred language and framework as part of your GitHub workflow in a few simple steps.

• Better JIRA integration: The improved integration allows software teams to connect their code on GitHub.com to their projects on JIRA Software Cloud. The new app updates JIRA with data from GitHub, providing your team with visibility into the status of your work.

• Slack app for GitHub: The updated slack app brings GitHub activity right into your channels—keeping your teams up-to-date and productive. Along with the new app, we released some improvements, such as slash commands and private link previews.

• GitHub extension for Visual Studio: Available for both GitHub.com and GitHub Enterprise, you can fork and customize GitHub for Visual Studio Code until it’s everything you want it to be.

• GitHub for Unity: The new Unity package provides Unity game developers with the benefits of source control and GitHub without having to switch to the command line.

• Checks API: Instead of pass/fail build statuses, your integrations can now report richer results, annotate code with detailed information, and kick off reruns—all within the GitHub user interface.

• GitHub Experiments: We launched Experiments—a collection of demonstrations highlighting our most exciting research projects and ideas.

• GitHub Desktop 1.1-1.5 releases: With five releases in 2018, GitHub Desktop is improving fast. With this year’s improvements you can compare branches, get notified when the default branch has updates to pull into your branch, compare conflicts before merging, and initiate a merge in the branch dropdown. Watch for our 1.6 release in early 2019.

Security

The security challenges that underpin software today are community problems. Developers and organizations have to protect their projects and businesses while staying vigilant and current on new security threats. Here are some of the notable 2018 ships that will help keep your code safe.

• New improvements and best practices for account security and recoverability: In July we released new improvements meant to keep software development happening on GitHub safer.

• Security vulnerability alerts available for Python, Java and .NET: Our security vulnerability alerts now support Java and .NET (in addition to existing support for JavaScript, Ruby, and Python). With security vulnerability alerts, organization owners and repository admins receive a notification when a known vulnerability enters a codebase.

• Token scanning: Ensure your tokens and keys are never accidentally committed and exposed in a public repository. We scan public repositories to search for known token formats. If we find a token, we alert the provider who will validate it and contact the account owner to issue a new token.

• Security Advisory API: To power GitHub security features, we aggregate and validate security feeds and monitor dependency upgrades across millions of projects. With the new API, this data is at your fingertips and ready to be integrated into the tools and services you already use.

Learning

Our goal is to lower the barrier to entry for anyone who wants to learn to code. GitHub Education had a big 2018 with product and program improvements to make it easier for student developers to get the real-world experience they need to build great software—and lead the next generation of software developers.

• Classroom Assistant: We launched Classroom Assistant to allow educators to easily download all the repositories in their course. It’s a cross-platform desktop application, available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

• GitHub Education: GitHub Education helps students, teachers, and schools access the tools and events they need to shape the next generation of software development.

• Student Developer Pack: The Student Developer Pack provides students with access to the best real-world tools so they can learn to code by doing. Unlike other free student tools in the industry, GitHub does not require a school email address to get the Student Developer Pack, which lowers the barrier to entry for millions of new developers worldwide. In 2018 we made the pack even better with the addition of Algolia, Heroku, GitKraken Glo, and JetBrains.

In 2019 we’re going to keep listening and keep shipping. We’re going to continue to build great products while maintaining our commitment to supporting developers in their choice of any language, license, tool, platform, or cloud. Thank you to all 31 million of you—we can’t wait to see what you build next.

It’s been over six months since we introduced GitHub for Unity 1.0, and we’ve been busy. Since launch, we’ve continued to improve the extension and fix bugs, focusing on maintenance and providing an overall smoother experience.

GitHub Enterprise support

The GitHub for Unity team received multiple requests to support GitHub Enterprise. Most recently, a team wanted to use the Unity plugin for their gaming engine but needed Enterprise support. GitHub Engineer @stanleygoldman addressed the request and shortly after, we were able to release a beta for customers to use and share feedback on.

In this release, GitHub for Unity version 1.2.0 officially supports GitHub Enterprise. Now, even more developers will be able to use the GitHub for Unity extension.

What’s next for GitHub for Unity

We’re a small team. We’re still trying to figure out what our impact should be and what work we should focus on. In 2019, we’re excited to see what’s in store for GitHub for Unity—and we’d love to hear your thoughts.

If you have questions, feedback, or want to get involved in building the GitHub for Unity extension, reach out to us in the project repository or on Twitter. Or see what we’ve been up to—try GitHub for Unity.

Your trust is our first priority. That’s why we’re making it easy to get all of the data connected to your profile, whenever you need it. Now you can better understand what information we store, so you can make informed choices about how you use GitHub.

How it works

Follow these steps to request an archive of your data:

1. Visit your account settings page.
2. Click “Start export” in the “Export account data” section. You will receive an email when the export is ready.
3. Click the link in the email to download the archive.

The archive will contain your profile data, plan, and any email addresses connected with your account in addition to the issues, pull requests, comments, reviews, releases, projects, events, attachments, milestones, and settings for each of your repositories—along with basic information about the users who have interacted with them.

Since the information is exported in a machine-readable format (Git and JSON), the archive allows you to back up your data offline, or move it to another service altogether. After all, it’s your data.

Archives remain available for seven days or until you choose to delete them. If you want more control over what information is exported, or if you want to export an organization’s information, use the Migration API.

Learn more about archiving your data

This article is part of a series based on our 2018 State of the Octoverse report—trends and insights into GitHub activity, the open source community, and more from the GitHub Data Science Team.

In 2018 alone, we saw more new users than in our first six years combined, and we celebrated hosting over 100 million repositories. All of this growth is thanks to the open source community. Together, you’ve built and collaborated on a broad spectrum of projects, from hobbies to professional tools and across varying developer experience levels. As the year comes to a close, we wanted our final Octoverse report of 2018 to highlight some of your most active new open source projects of the year.

To look back at your projects, we pulled data from December 10, 2017 to December 9, 2018. We pulled the top projects open sourced in 2018 by the number of stars the project received in its first 28 days being public and by the number of unique contributors to the project in the first 28 days being public.

Top projects of 2018

The top projects open sourced in 2018 run the gamut from learning to code to tools for professionals, from side projects for fun to projects for getting work done.

For those new to code, or new to a coding language, you starred projects with coding examples, like trekhleb/javascript-algorithms and leonardomso/33-js-concepts, along with quick tutorials like 30-seconds/30-seconds-of-code.

You also contributed to projects for Hacktoberfest, adding Hello World programs in a variety of languages to Hacktoberfest-2018/Hello-world and Omkar-Ajnadkar/Hello-World, or even more complex algorithm examples to VAR-solutions/Algorithms.

You also had a lot of fun, starring and contributing to gaming projects like wangshub/wechat_jump_game, and had some laughs with projects like kelseyhightower/nocode. felixrieseberg/windows95 and Microsoft/MS-DOS sparked some nostalgia, quickly attracting your stars and contributions.

New open source projects also helped you get work done with tools like denoland/deno for developing in TypeScript, ValveSoftware/Proton for porting games to Linux, and facebookresearch/Detectron to support research in image recognition algorithms.

Based on stars

We pulled the top 10 projects open sourced in 2018 based on the total number of stars they accumulated in their first 28 days on GitHub.

Based on contributors

We pulled the top 10 projects open sourced in the 365 days prior to December 10, 2018 based on the total number of contributors to the project in their first 28 days on GitHub.

Top topics for new open source projects

These are the non-language topics that had the biggest increase in number of open source projects created in 2018 compared to 2017. Third on the list, dotnet shows that more open source projects are developing apps for Windows. In our programming languages post, JavaScript was the most popular language for new projects, and we see nodejs, react, and vue in the top topics for 2018—all tools for developing in JavaScript. Machine learning is also gaining momentum on GitHub with new open source projects tagged machine-learning.

1. nodejs
2. react
3. dotnet
4. docker
5. android
6. machine-learning
7. api
8. ios
9. cli
10. vue

Whether you’re here to do your job or tinker with new technologies, it’s exciting to see an environment where where new developers feel comfortable in code and experienced users have open source communities and projects to innovate. Cheers and congratulations to a year of new ideas emerging, knowledge gained, and continually changing the way we build and think about software development.

Stay tuned for more posts that dive in data on the GitHub Blog—or check out our reports on breaks and holidays and programming languages to see what a community of 31 million developers can accomplish in a year.