GitHub provides everything an enterprise needs to enable organisations improve developer velocity and promote collaboration while staying secure end-to-end.
As an enterprise you can leverage fully managed SaaS GitHub offering with GitHub Enterprise Cloud (GHEC) and/or have a self-hosted installation of GitHub known as GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES).
This article focuses on taking advantages of a feature called GitHub Connect to enhance your on-premises GitHub Enterprise Server.
GitHub Connect allows you to access additional features and workflows for your GitHub Enterprise Server instance. Targeted to help improve admin experience, developer experience and security posture. It enables you to create bridge between GitHub Enterprise customers that use a self-hosted installation and SaaS offering.
Benefits of using GitHub Connect
1. Improves Admin Experience
License sync capability is one of the biggest helpful features, it enables you to use one single unique license per user even if they're using both GHEC and GHES
2. Improves Developer Experience
Enables unified search across GHEC and GHES, unified actions marketplace and unified contributions.
- GitHub Actions – Enables GitHub Actions workflows on GitHub Enterprise Server to use actions directly from GitHub.com or GitHub Marketplace
- Unified Search - Improve usability by enabling unified search across GHEC and GHES, including repos on GitHub.com in their search.
- Unified contributions - If your organization is supportive of your developers building their brand. This feature allows users to include anonymized contribution counts for their work on your GitHub Enterprise Server instance in their contribution graphs on GitHub.com.
3. Improves Supply Chain Security
Using GitHub Connect enables you to use core supply chain security features for your GitHub Server instance.
- Dependency Graph
- Dependabot Alerts
- Dependabot Updates
With Dependabot alerts, GitHub identifies vulnerable dependencies in repositories and creates alerts on your GitHub Enterprise Server instance, using data from the GitHub Advisory Database and the dependency graph service. While Dependabot alert bring in security advisory, Dependabot Updates do the actual pull request.
GitHub Connect benefits by deployment
Is it safe to install GitHub Connect?
Yes absolutely, no repositories, issues, or pull requests are ever transmitted from GitHub Enterprise Server to GitHub.com by GitHub Connect.
None of your enterprise's private data is exposed to GitHub.com users. It does not open your GitHub Enterprise Server instance to the public internet.
GitHub Connect transmits only the limited data needed for the individual features you choose to enable.
Learn more about GitHub Connect here
