GitHub

GitHub : Quickly review changed functions in your PHP pull requests

GitHub is one of the greatest tools for developers ever. And it keeps getting better. Most of the new features that GitHub introduces are usually generic and apply to all developers universally. Today, however, they have a special present for the PHP developers – Quickly review changed functions in your PHP pull requests. This is mighty useful, especially on the larger pull requests.

GitHub GraphQL API v4

I’ve briefly mentioned before that GitHub joined the adopters of the GraphQL for their API. Here’s the link to the full documentation and more details.

GitHub chose GraphQL for our API v4 because it offers significantly more flexibility for our integrators. The ability to define precisely the data you want—and only the data you want—is a powerful advantage over the REST API v3 endpoints. GraphQL lets you replace multiple REST requests with a single call to fetch the data you specify.

GitHub : Security Alerts and Team Discussions

GitHub blog recently announced a couple of interesting new features.

Firstly, Security Alerts. For now it only supports Ruby and JavaScript, but hopefully other languages are coming soon (PHP/Composer please!). Security Alerts will notify repository owners if there are any known security issues in any of the packages that the repository is using. Similar, I guess, to who SensioLabs Security Check works, but integrated with your GitHub.

Secondly, Team Discussions. This is yet another way place for the team to communicate. There are Issues and Pull Requests already. But those are more specific and more focused. For anything that doesn’t have a single issue, or doesn’t have a PR yet, a Team Discussion might be a better place.

GitHub : Archiving Repositories

Last week, GitHub introduced archiving of repositories. While it might not seem like a news worthy feature, it is quite useful for both individuals and teams. Two particular scenarios that I find helpful are:

Indicate that a particular repository / project is obsolete and is not maintained. This should save quite a bit of time for people who randomly end up on a project’s page, via searching GitHub/Packagist/Google or somewhere else.
Provide an insight into how many of the person’s or team’s profile are active. It’s often difficult to estimate at a first glance, when looking at a GitHub profile of a person or a team who have been developing for a long time, how many of their projects are actually actively maintained.

GraphQL – a query language for your API

GraphQL is a query language for the API. It’s been used by the Facebook mobile app since 2012. The specification was open sourced in 2015. And now GitHub is getting on board as well. This looks interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsPVrbDHgaY