GitHub Enterprise Server 3.17 is now generally available! 🚀

[tuves]

GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES) 3.17 enhances deployment efficiency, monitoring capabilities, code security, and policy management. Here are a few highlights in the 3.17 release:

• GitHub Advanced Security (GHAS) is now available as two standalone security products: GitHub Secret Protection and GitHub Code Security. Existing GitHub Advanced Security customers with subscription-based plans can choose to transition when they renew. Customers with pay-as-you-go, metered-based plans can transition at any time. Please reach out to your GitHub or Microsoft sales account team for details. See the secret protection and code security changelog and our unbundling docs for more information.

• System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM), a popularly requested enterprise identity management feature, is now generally available! SCIM is a leading standard for user lifecycle management in SaaS applications. Enterprise administrators can configure SCIM for their GHES instance, which supports automatic provisioning of new user accounts and groups through our SCIM API. For more details, see SCIM.

• An enterprise account is now supported as an owner of GitHub Apps. When an enterprise-owned app is updated to request new permissions, the update is automatically accepted by all the organizations where it's installed. Previously, GitHub Apps could only be owned by organizations and users, and they could be set to either private or public. For more details, see Enterprise owned GitHub apps.

• Fine-grained PATs are now generally available. With this release, you can use token lifetime policies at the enterprise account level to control the expiration times of the PATs created by your users. The enterprise policy applies to all user accounts on the instance, but organizations can set more restrictive policies as needed.

• Developers can now use Dependabot to automatically keep their Docker Compose dependencies and bun dependencies up to date. For projects that use Docker Compose or bun as a package manager, Dependabot version updates can now ensure dependencies stay current with the latest releases. For more details, see dependabot and docker compose and dependabot and bun.

• We’ve updated the contributors and code frequency repository insight views to improve navigation, allow hiding a series by interacting with the chart legend, and enable viewing and downloading the data as a CSV or PNG. For more details see repository insight views.

• CodeQL version 2.20.7 has been released. For more details on significant updates since 3.16, see code security.

• Ruleset history, import, and export are now generally available. Import and export make it easy to share and reuse rulesets. History allows administrators to easily track and rollback changes in the ruleset UI and API. For more details, see ruleset management.

• You can now restrict pushes into your private and internal repositories and their forks with push rules. Push rules are a new type of ruleset that allow you to restrict updates to sensitive files, such as actions workflows. They help enforce code hygiene by keeping unwanted objects out of your repositories. In addition, organization owners can now allow repository property values to be set when repositories are created. This ensures appropriate rules are enforced from the moment of creation and improves discoverability of new repositories. For more details, see push rules.

• GitHub Enterprise Server Backup Service is now available within the appliance. Today, customers use backup-utils, an open-source system you install on a separate host, which takes backup snapshots of GHES data at regular intervals over a secure SSH network connection. With the new backup service, there is no need to run a separate host for backing up data. The backup service is in public preview. For more information, see GitHub Enterprise Server backup service.

To learn more about GHES 3.17, check out the release notes or download it now. If you have any issues upgrading to version 3.17 or experience any issues using these new features, please contact our support team.

[sstrullmyer]

Great stuff!

Regarding the GitHub Enterprise Server Backup Service in particular, the About the backup service for GitHub Enterprise Server documentation calls out (emphasis mine):

GitHub Enterprise Server Backup Service is currently in public preview and is subject to change. During the public preview, the service is available at no additional cost.

Is this new boilerplate language for public preview features in GHES, or is there anticipation for future breakout of this functionality in terms of licensing?

[pallsama]

@sstrullmyer, thanks for reaching out. We included that language because functionality can change as a feature graduates from preview to general availability and customers can use it with their current GHES licensing. Currently, there are no plans to change the licensing for the backup service, even after it becomes generally available though.

Would you like to participate in the preview?

[sstrullmyer]

Great, thank you @pallsama!

Happy to participate; we'll go ahead and enable this in our non-prod GHES to start 😄

[pallsama]

Great. Thanks. Please share any questions or feedback here.

[Rand-Random]

does this update include the sub-issue feature which was annoced in april 2025 to be GA? ( https://github.blog/changelog/2025-04-09-evolving-github-issues-and-projects/ )
if not, is there a timeline for this?

is there a general plan / idea when feature x is realease on github it is to be expected to be relased y months later on github entprise?

Edit:
after further digging I found this:
github/roadmap#1036
https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/154148#discussioncomment-13345752

[pallsama]

@Rand-Random, I am glad you found the discussion post that answers your question about sub-issues.

Generally, dotcom features planned for GHES are shipped 6 to 12 months after they ship on dotcom.

[rudramistry001]

HOW TO CHECK THE PRICING FOR GITHUB ENTERPRISE EXCLUDING THE GITHUB CO PILOT ???AND IS GITHUB CO PILOT A COMPLIMENTARY SERVICE PROVIDED WITH ENTERPRISE PLANS??

[pallsama]

GitHub Enterprise pricing details are available here: https://github.com/pricing. An enterprise user can get a seat in the cloud and on server and will be counted as consuming one license. There are multiple add-ons, and Copilot is one of them. Without any add-ons, you will probably pay the base price per user per month that you see on the pricing page.

Do you have an account manager helping? There is a Contact Sales option on the pricing page. You can reach out to our sales team, and they will be able to help you with the various pricing plans.

[UbiquitousBear]

Noticed this banner on the Enterprise site:

We've had a few reports of performance issues with 3.15, 3.16, and 3.17 GHES releases, and out of an abundance of caution, we're recommending not to upgrade to these versions until further notice.

Does anyone know what these performance issues are or have seen?