We have had a number of people ask us about access to GitHub Co-Pilot in recent months and now staff and students at the University can get free access to the tool through GitHub Education. If you aren’t sure what it is, how it can help you or what the risks of using it are, read on.

Dependency tracking is one of the tasks that it is easy to forget to do, and yet is important for code of any lasting significance. GitHub has tools available to help you keep up to date to avoid unsupported dependencies and vulnerabilities. Anyone producing code at the University is encouraged to take advantage of these tools so problems due to upstream code are addressed more rapidly.

The Spring meeting of the Manchester Research Software Community featured a presentation on GitHub Project Automation as well as breakout groups to discuss the next steps for the group. Aman Goel reflects on what the community has achieved so far and their plans for the future.

The second meeting of the Manchester Research Software community featured two presentations: the first on the use of agile practices in research software; and one on the recently launched University instance of GitHub Enterprise. The presentations are now available to the University research community.

Schools, departments, institutes, and labs are all now eligible to join our University GitHub Enterprise account. You can keep your existing repositories, organisation, and GitHub account but you can now access enterprise-tier resources for free! Adrian Harwood, Head of Research Software Engineering, explains how.

In August, GitHub announced software citation support in GitHub repositories. Discover how Rob Haines, Head of Research IT, played an instrumental role in making this happen.

Learn more about using Github repositories for starting new projects from two of our Research Software Engineers Douglas Lowe and Robin Long.

Git is becoming a common tool, widely used for organising code, recording developments, etc. Often, we want to reuse code from one project for another, or to have a standard layout or template that can be used for similar projects. Here Robin Long and Douglas Lowe, from the RSE team, will detail the features available in git and github for making your life easier with this.

A number of training courses in research IT will take place in September to coincide with the start of term. The courses are open to all University of Manchester researchers (both staff and post grad).