Today, the number of applications and some ready-made independent libraries, microservices, and frameworks can make every developer a little bit dizzy. Of course, those programs speed up and ease the development process to such an extent that sometimes you don’t need special education or equipment to build applications that work!
GitHub Marketplace
And so GitHub knows that! That is why in 2017 the GitHub Marketplace was founded. Now it’s a mine of useful tools and apps for developers working with GitHub. From small plugins to big serious projects that enable fast and easy development. Some of them are free, other paid ones but most of them offer a free trial period. Those apps are made by external software vendors, individual developers, and GitHub itself. The most popular is GitHub Learning Lab that teaches practice skills once using this version control hosting platform.
Actually, in GitHub Marketplace you can find thousands of apps from many different categories, including continuous integration, monitoring, GitHub security, code quality, API management, testing, and much more.
Continuous Integration & cooperation GitHub apps
Continuous Integration is definitely one of the most popular categories of apps. And here we should mention two projects that we personally find very useful. Free Circle CI and paid for private and free for public – Travis CI. This second one offers definitely more configuration options for pipelines so it is a good explanation for a paid plan.
For every kind of job, proper communication is key. Developers also need programs for efficient integration with the most popular messengers. Here we should definitely mention Microsoft Teams for GitHub and Slack + GitHub. These apps display in a given channel every action made in the repository (so for instance each new Pull Request) or successful deployment. Thanks to them, every team member with access to such a messenger stays up to date with the project.
Another noteworthy app is Imgbot. It scans repositories in search of image files that are compressed then without any impact on quality so you save memory and speed up the application. Then, the compressed image file is added as a Pull Request (PR) and then it can be handled manually or with some special app, like Mergify that creates rules to accept or reject specific PR, so for example those opened by Imgbot.
GitHub Security – TOP apps
One of the most important categories in GitHub Marketplace is definitely security. Here you can find projects for code scanning, vulnerabilities prevention, backup and disaster recovery, secret detection, and much more. When it comes to code scanning and hard-coded secret detection in repositories GitGuardian comes with a rescue – this project lets you scan and detect hard-coded secrets in your source code. Contrary to appearances, keeping credentials and other secrets in repositories is a very common problem so this app can definitely prevent you from losing your data once someone finds hidden credentials.
And it’s not only one situation that can put your source code in danger – malicious human error (i.e. of ex-employee), service outage, ransomware attack, natural disaster… – just to mention a few. Your source code needs to be automatically protected and recoverable. GitProtect.io GitHub Backup automates your repositories and metadata backup and makes your data accessible and recoverable from any point in time (due to unlimited retention). And it is available in GitHub Marketplace, so all you need to do is to set up a free trial account in Marketplace, so your organization will be connected and automatic backups running. Advanced audit logs, visual dashboard statistics, email, or even Slack notifications will keep you updated with backup performance. If you use self-made backup scripts you will definitely be impressed about backup plan configuration possibilities, enterprise-class features, instant Disaster Recovery, and central management console. This app lets you reduce administrative time and overhead. Set it, forget it and just stay notified. It’s really that easy.
