Give us access to your GitHub repository
How to safely invite our development team to your GitHub code repository for custom software and headless web builds.
- Time
- 3 minutes
- Difficulty
- Intermediate
- You’ll need
- Your GitHub login · Admin rights on the repository
If we are building a highly customized web application, a headless architecture, or collaborating with your internal engineering team, your project's code likely lives in GitHub. To push new code, manage version control, and deploy updates, we need access to your repository.
Quick summary
Log in to GitHub, open your repository, and click the Settings tab. In the Access section of the sidebar, click Collaborators (or Collaborators & teams on a repository owned by an organization), then click Add people. Search for the GitHub usernames your project lead gave you. On an organization's repository you also pick a role, usually Write or Maintain.
Step-by-step instructions
For version control platforms like GitHub, access is typically granted to specific developer accounts rather than a general support email. Your Chykalophia project lead will provide you with the exact GitHub usernames of the engineers assigned to your project.
The screens differ slightly depending on who owns the repository. A repository owned by a personal account has only two levels, owner and collaborator, so there is no role to choose. A repository owned by an organization lets you pick a role for each person.
Log in to GitHub. Sign in to github.com with an account that has Admin privileges over the repository.
Navigate to the repository. Open the specific code repository we will be working in.
Go to Settings. Under your repository name, click Settings. If you can't see a "Settings" tab, open the dropdown menu and click Settings there.
Open Collaborators. In the Access section of the sidebar, click Collaborators. On a repository owned by an organization, this is called Collaborators & teams.
Add people. Click Add people. On an organization's repository, the button sits to the right of "Manage access".
Enter our usernames. In the search field, start typing a username your project lead gave you, then click the matching name in the list.
Confirm. On an organization's repository, choose the role your project lead asked for under Choose a role. Then click the confirm button, which names the person and the repository, such as "Add jane-dev to my-site". On a personal repository there is no role to pick, and collaborators there get read and write access. Either way, we get an email invitation, and access starts once we accept it.
Common questions
Why do you need 'Write' or 'Maintain' access instead of 'Read'?
These roles only exist on repositories owned by an organization. GitHub recommends Read for "non-code contributors who want to view or discuss your project", which isn't enough to build anything. Write is the one GitHub recommends for "contributors who actively push to your project", so that is our normal ask. Maintain is for people who need to manage the repository itself "without access to sensitive or destructive actions", such as editing the repository description or pushing to a protected branch. Your project lead will say which one we need.
On a repository owned by a personal account there is nothing to choose: collaborators can read and write, and GitHub doesn't offer a read-only collaborator on a private personal repository.
Can I just add you to our GitHub Organization instead?
Yes, with one wrinkle in the wording. GitHub calls someone who isn't a member of your organization, but does have access to one or more of its repositories, an outside collaborator. So an admin adds our developers repository by repository, setting the role each time, rather than adding us to the organization once. Two other things to know first. Outside collaborators can't be put into your organization's teams, because team membership is limited to organization members. And unless your organization is on a free plan, adding an outside collaborator to a private repository uses one of your paid licenses. If your organization requires two-factor authentication, GitHub won't let us accept the invitation until we have it switched on. We use it regardless.
Related guides
- Why we ask for access (and why it's safe)
- Delegate access vs. sharing a password
- How we keep your logins safe
- How to revoke our access later
- Access checklist for a new project
- Access directory (A–Z)
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