Microsoft-owned repository management service GitHub has put the finishing touches to version 2.20 of its Enterprise Server, which is now available featuring security improvements as well as better insight.

The team behind the commercial on-premises version of popular GitHub.com have, for example, added an option to prevent merge commits from being pushed to matching branches. This is meant to keep the commit history linear. 

Enterprise Server 2.20 also provides admins with a way of allowing all users with push access to delete protected branches or force push to them. Meanwhile regular users of the offering can now get insight into access audit logs via the security log tab of their settings page.

Apart from that, the new version saw the addition of internal visibility, which users with a GitHub Enterprise Cloud account might already be familiar with. The new option gives Enterprise Server users the option of making a new repository only visible to members of an enterprise account.

That way, they can work together while keeping the project invisible to collaborators outside the organisation. Further restrictions can be implemented in the usual way, by making a repository private and allowing access to assigned users and teams only.

Since GitHub is currently working on unifying terminology and user experience between Enterprise Cloud and Server, users will soon see adjustments to the terms public, internal, and private. To make this work, Enterprise Server subscribers who have private mode enabled will have to migrate their instances at some point. 

A tool to facilitate the move is already available for testing purposes. Once it has run, all public repositories of an organisation will have turned into internal ones, the creation of public repositories will have been disabled, and users’ public repositories as well as public repo forks will have become private. More information about the migration process can be found in the docs.

Other changes included in Enterprise Server 2.20 are apparently mainly made up of performance improvements and bug fixes.