Nowadays, the IT world takes advantage of the fact that it is easy to become a programmer. It’s easy in the sense that you don’t need any special education, license or very expensive equipment. All you need is a computer and Internet access and everyone can try their hand. In addition, the development of microservices, independent libraries and frameworks has meant that more and more programmers exchange their programs and use ready-made solutions to speed up and improve their own work.
GitHub Marketplace
GitHub has also contributed to the development of such a community. Free services or support for open-source projects allow every developer to take part in the development of many initiatives from around the world. These can be small things like a simple browser plugin, or huge projects like jQuery. Often these apps are simply tools that make our work easier. It is important to understand that modern software development is based on the use of external solutions.
For this purpose, GitHub Marketplace was established in 2017. There are thousands of smaller and larger applications to extend your workflows. Some are paid, others are free. They concern topics such as CI/CD, Code Review or Security. Everyone can also add their own project. GitHub itself also provides their applications there. For example, the most popular application in the entire store, which is GitHub Learning Lab, which will teach the skills useful when using this platform.
Popular GitHub apps
Apart from the already mentioned Learning Lab, the most popular apps concern the Continuous Integration area. Namely, it is the free CircleCI and the paid (free for open-source) Travis CI. The latter has more configuration options for our pipelines, but that’s not surprising since you have to pay for it.
Applications for integration with popular messengers, such as Slack + GitHub or Microsoft Teams for GitHub, are also useful. Thanks to them, every action in the repository, such as a new Pull Request or a successful Deployment, will be immediately displayed on the selected channel in the messenger, which will speed up and facilitate communication.
Apart from CI or various integrations, you can also find other useful applications in GitHub Marketplace, such as Imgbot. That one automatically scans the repository for image files and compresses them without any loss in quality. This allows us to save memory and, as a result, speed up the operation of our application. The image compressed in this way is added by Imgbot as a pull request, and we can handle it either personally or using another clever tool – Mergify. This one allows us to create rules that can automatically accept or reject selected pull requests, e.g. those opened by Imgbot.
Security
A very important and critical aspect of our projects is their security. In this regard, we can also find help in GitHub Marketplace. One of them is GitGuardian – a tool that detects hard-coded secrets in commits and repositories. Contrary to appearances, this is a fairly common problem, and this application can save our skin and money.
From a security perspective, it is also important to create backups and restoration plans. You never know when you will become a victim of a ransomware attack, developer error, or technical failure. You must always be prepared for it. Applications such as GitProtect.io Backup (https://gitprotect.io/github.html) come to the rescue. This is a GitHub backup app that offers us professional automatic backup and fast data recovery. Let’s check some of the key features:
- fast and easy setup – just add your GitHub account
- no maintenance needed – repositories will be added automatically to the plan
- metadata backup – all issues, actions and wikis will be kept
- continuous monitoring – Email, slack notifications, audit logs and visual statistics
From the end-user perspective, it is a very convenient, clear and understandable application. The accessible UI immediately allows us to check the state of our repositories, and the statistics allow us to analyze and make further business decisions. If we use this type of application, we will thank ourselves in the future. And the sooner we start, the better.
