Now it’s easy to become a programmer – sometimes you don’t need any license, special education, advanced courses, or expensive equipment. Basically, you need Internet access and a computer to try your hand. To make it even easier and speed up your work you can easily access ready-made independent libraries, frameworks, microservices.
GitHub Marketplace
GitHub knows that best! Free services and even support for open-source projects let every developer take part in many initiatives globally. These can be simple plugins or serious projects. One is sure – these tools make the development process way easier so it’s not a surprise that software development nowadays is based on the use of ready-made, external solutions.
And here it comes – GitHub Marketplace. The place where from 2017 developers can take advantage of thousands of small and huge projects to extend and speed up their workflows. Some of them are paid ones, others are free and most have at least a free trial period. They come from software vendors, GitHub itself, and even personal projects because everyone can add their own app in there. Most popular? GitHub Learning Lab, that will teach useful skills when using this fascinating platform.
But you can find apps in many different categories – API management, code quality, continuous integration, GitHub security, monitoring, project management, and more.
TOP GitHub apps
Now, let’s find out which apps are most popular in GitHub Marketplace. We should mention here popular Continuous Integration projects. Including the free CircleCI and Travis CI – free for open-source and paid for private. The latter offers more configuration options for our pipelines. Thus it’s not surprising why you have to pay for it.
Every team needs some apps for integration with widely used messengers so apps like Microsoft Teams for GitHub and Slack + GitHub are very popular among developers. Thanks to those apps, every action in the repo, for example, a new Pull Request (PR) or Deployment is instantly displayed in a given messenger channel so each team member can see that and stay up to date.
Now let’s explain some of the apps that can be found in GitHub Marketplace that ease development process. Imgbot instantly scans the repos for image files and then compresses them without any quality loss. As a result, we save memory and speed up our application. Such compressed image is then added as a PR and we can handle it manually or with another app – Mergify. It creates rules to automatically accept or reject specific PR (f.i. those opened by Imgbot).
TOP GitHub Security apps
Finally, we have a security category in GitHub Marketplace as each IT project needs to be protected. Here we can find security scanning and secret detection projects. So here it comes GitGuardian – a project that scans and detects hard-coded secrets (like credentials) in repositories and commits. Believe it or not, but it is a fairly common problem so this app can save your skin and money.
Basically, there is a long list of situations when your source code and hours of work might get lost. Unintentional human mistakes, service outages, natural disasters, and more. That is why you would need backup and recovery software, like GitProtect.io that automates repository and metadata backup and disaster recovery for your projects. Once it is available in GitHub Marketplace, all you need to start running automatic backups is to set up a free trial account in Marketplace. Then your organization will connect and from this moment all the repositories and metadata will be automatically protected. Thanks to advanced audit logs and email or even Slack notifications you will stay up to date with backup status and updates. Even if you already do file backups or use git clone, here you manage entire GitHub data protection in an intuitive central management console and reduce your time and administrative overhead. And once you need to restore the data from any point-in-time – you do this instantly by choosing the repositories and metadata you want to restore (all or chosen), time from when you want your data back, and destination. Voila!
