GitHub as a platform is used by individual programmers and huge organizations alike. Regardless of how many people you’re working with though, “GitHub Organizations” present some nice tools for people managing multiple projects.
What Are GitHub Organizations?
GitHub Organizations is a feature of GitHub that allows you to create a central place where team members can access and manage repositories and other resources.
Organizations provide a great dashboard for showcasing your projects and managing groups of repositories with a common branding. It’s not uncommon for open source projects (even those with single authors) to have multiple repositories for associated tools and internal packages.
Grouping them all under one name on a non-personal account is a great organizational tool. Repositories made under organizations will use the organization name instead of your personal account as the prefix, which can look more professional.
Beyond that, Organizations also provide many features for teams, such as centralized user and permission management. Organization administrators can add members to the organization, giving them permissions to read and write to repositories in the org. With GitHub Enterprise, you can also make custom teams and roles within the organization for more fine-tuned management. You can always manually add people as outside collaborators on specific repositories though.
Organizations also provide internal discussion boards on GitHub itself. These may not be useful for most bigger teams, who would prefer external tools like Slack and Jira, but for open-source projects that have traditionally collaborated on GitHub, it is a nice addition.
Another benefit of centralized management is GitHub Secrets, which can be set at the organization-level to apply to all repositories. This makes managing private keys for multiple repos much easier.
Organizations are free to use, just like the rest of GitHub, with the usual restrictions on private repositories. You can still create unlimited public and private repositories under an org, but some of the more advanced tools are locked behind the GitHub Teams paywall.
Using an Organization
Organizations are shared accounts that can host repositories, just like personal accounts. However, you don’t sign-in to an organization account—it’s still managed from your personal account, and you can own and collaborate at multiple organizations.
To create an Organization, head over to your GitHub profile menu and click “Your Organizations.” This is where you will manage and access the organizations you’re a part of, though they will also show on your profile.
Click “create a new organization,” and you’ll be brought to a page trying to sell you on GitHub Teams and Enterprise. You can always upgrade later, of course, and the free tier includes most features.
You’ll need to give it a name and contact information. One thing to note here is that you can set up the organization to belong to your business itself, not just your personal account. This is really only useful for corporations who want legal ownership over it, and you’ll still need to appoint yourself as an organization owner to manage it.
Now, when creating a repository on GitHub, you can select the drop-down to create it under your organization accounts:
One thing you’ll want to edit is the member privileges under the organization’s settings. If you have a small team where you want everyone to be able to access everything, you can simply set the base permission to “admin” to enable all permissions.
To add a user as a member, you can do so under the “People” category. They will need to accept the confirmation email to be added. You can also add people to specific repositories from the “Outside Collaborators” tab.
If you want to transfer a repository to your Organization account, the process is the same as transferring to another user, except you’ll still be able to access it afterwards of course. You can read our guide on transferring GitHub repositories to learn more.
RELATED: How to Transfer a Github Repository to Your Organization (or Another User)
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