I'm part of a GitHub organization developing a FOSS project. I'd like to run CI tests on Windows using AppVeyor. Currently I see my own fork of the project, and some other forks from people who have named me collaborator in GitHub. I don't see the upstream of the project, though. Apparently me being an administrator of the GitHub organization isn't enough to offer access to it in AppVeyor. But probably setting this up under my account would be the wrong approach anyway. Probably this should be under the name of the organization.
Towards that end, I'd like to have an AppVeyor account for this organization, with suitable permissions for its members. Reading http://www.appveyor.com/docs/team-setup it sounds as if AppVeyor could distinguish between users (with unique email and password) and accounts (to which projects belong), and a single user apparently can belong to multiple accounts while one account can have multiple users with different roles. In that sense, I'd like to create a new account without creating a user for it. Instead I as an existing user, identified by GitHub login, would like to become the first administrator of this new account, and ready to change settings and add more users. How do I do this?
You can't create a new account without a user. Just use some your email/password to create an account, then add existing user as collaborator.
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I asked this question on the github community support forum, but I'll ask this here too since no reply there...
I am trying to setup a Github App to give some scripts limited Admin rights to some repos in an Organisation. The Organisation is (I believe) under an Enterprise account - we are using this currently instead of having an Enterprise server. I have created the App, transferred it to the Organisation, and one of the Organisation Admins (which I an not) has set me as the manager. So far so good. However, although I can see the App in the Organisation Settings, there is no “Install App” button. Also trying to use it in scripting gives 401 (A JSON web token could not be decoded) errors trying to get hold of a “PAT” for the app - even though the Admin has installed it into the app.
There is obviously something wrong but I’m at a loss. Does anybody know of some extra logs that can be looked at or have a suggestion on how to approach this. We’ve tried deleting the app and retrying - no different. I should say this is the third app I’ve created for transferring into the organisation this way - so far it has just worked.
We raised a support ticket on this so got a formal answer. I thought it might be useful to replicate the key part of the answer here. Essentially the issue is the fact this App has Admin rights. I am an Administrator on some of the repos, and am "App Manager" for this App, but I am not an Owner of the Organisation.
I quote:
"""GitHub App permission requests [control] access to a number of organization REST API endpoints... As these endpoints are outside the individual repository scope, only the organization owner can approve requests to add or change them. If this wasn't the case, App Managers who aren't organization owners would be able to grant an application the ability to view organization members and teams - which is private organization information that can otherwise only be granted by organization owners via inviting new organization members."""
Basically that is it. The original idea was to allow a central place to set some things that only an Administrator could set in a repo - c.f. branch rules. Seems that this can't be done as is with an App - the system just isn't flexible enough.
The alternative, which I know works, is to use the PAT of a user with Admin rights. That just feels less secure.
I want to know if there is a way to give access to a private repository to people who don't have a GitHub account. Like a link, app or integrating the GH account to some platform like Teams or Slack. The people I intend to share code with share a Microsoft Teams team with me and a corporation mail name#comapny.com. Secure an official suggestions only please.
If your goal is to give them access to clone a repository but not otherwise interact with it, then you can use read-only deploy keys to allow them to clone and fetch the repository via SSH.
Otherwise, if you need more access, then each user will need to have their own GitHub account. It's intentional that users need their own accounts to properly enforce access controls and 2FA policies and to permit users to block and report bad actors. GitHub does not permit accounts to be shared.
I am making a small Git / Github demo for first-time users and want to use Github Pages, for which I needed to create a new Github organization. During the 30 min I'll have to do the demo, users will need to create new Github accounts and join the organization. Since I'll have so little time, is it possible for users to request organization membership, rather than me having to invite each person manually by email lookup?
I've seen this before but only through third-party apps. Is there no way to do this directly within Github?
Directly with GitHub, I have seen no evidence of that feature.
Through third-party apps indeed, yes.
As an example: benbalter/add-to-org would automatically add users to an organization.
For smaller teams, this may not be possible. The feature that you have mentioned seems similar to user provisioning and is available for Enterprises through Okta /Azure Active Directory. This link has more details on the User Provisioning.
I'm confused about github machine users. I want to add an ssh key with read only rights to my repo to use for automation and have it tied to my repository/organization. But it seems like I need to create an actual github user that is not scoped to anything. I'm referring to where you add a collaborator by "Search by username, full name or email address". This seems like a poor match for what I'm trying to do. Is there a way to create a machine user that can be managed by the organization without creating a github user?
It's a sine qua non that an ssh key is associated with a user, so you must create a user. See https://developer.github.com/v3/guides/managing-deploy-keys/#machine-users
GitHub says it's "totally cool" to create a single machine user for automation.
As GitHub user I can create an organization. What i don't understand -- Is an organisation independent?
Is it a repositories container, that needs a (user) account it belongs to or
is it for itself an (organization) account GitHub user (and doesn't need any personal user account)? Is it then correct to say, that an organization is a "featured user" account -- an account with all the features of a personal user account (especially code management, commenting etc.) and some additional functionality?
The biggest difference between user accounts and organizations is team-based permissions for the repositories owned by the organization.
This means you can have team members under your organization and let them interact more aggressively with your repositories compared to plain contributors.
I'd say the concept of a GitHub organization is pretty independent from a plain GitHub user - they aren't the same thing. See for example how you can convert a user to an organization https://help.github.com/articles/converting-a-user-into-an-organization/
With that being said, organizations have what they call owners.
You can have multiple owners (i.e you can invite people to be owner of your organization along with you) but an organization cannot have zero owner.
For example, when you create an organization while logged under your account, the default first owner of the organization you just created is yourself.
Here's a more detailed list about the differences between a user and an organization
https://help.github.com/articles/what-s-the-difference-between-user-and-organization-accounts/
An organization is not a user, it doesn't have a password and you cannot log into an organization like you can to a personal/user account. But an organization can own repositories, which can be made accessible to actual persons/users who have passwords and can login.