Roles in an organization

About roles

To perform any actions on GitHub, such as creating a pull request in a repository or changing an organization's billing settings, a person must have sufficient access to the relevant account or resource. This access is controlled by permissions. A permission is the ability to perform a specific action. For example, the ability to delete an issue is a permission. A role is a set of permissions you can assign to individuals or teams.

Repository-level roles give organization members, outside collaborators and teams of people varying levels of access to repositories. For more information, see "Repository roles for an organization."

Team-level roles are roles that give permissions to manage a team. You can give any individual member of a team the team maintainer role, which gives the member a number of administrative permissions over a team. For more information, see "Assigning the team maintainer role to a team member."

Organization-level roles are sets of permissions that can be assigned to individuals or teams to manage an organization and the organization's repositories, teams, and settings. For more information about all the roles available at the organization level, see "About organization roles."

About organization roles

You can assign people to a variety of organization-level roles to control your members' access to your organization and its resources. For more details about the individual permissions included in each role, see "Permissions for organization roles."

For more granular control of access to your organization's settings, you can create a custom organization role. For more information, see "About custom organization roles."

If your organization is owned by an enterprise account, enterprise owners can choose to join your organization with any role. For more information, see "Managing your role in an organization owned by your enterprise."

Organization owners

Organization owners have complete administrative access to your organization. This role should be limited, but to no less than two people, in your organization. For more information, see "Maintaining ownership continuity for your organization."

Organization members

The default, non-administrative role for people in an organization is the organization member. By default, organization members have a number of permissions, including the ability to create repositories and projects.

Security managers

Security manager is an organization-level role that organization owners can assign to any team in an organization. When applied, it gives every member of the team permission to view security alerts and manage settings for code security across your organization, as well as read permission for all repositories in the organization.

If your organization has a security team, you can use the security manager role to give members of the team the least access they need to the organization. For more information, see "Managing security managers in your organization."

GitHub App managers

By default, only organization owners can manage the settings of GitHub App registrations owned by an organization. To allow additional users to manage GitHub App registrations owned by an organization, an owner can grant them GitHub App manager permissions.

When you designate a user as a GitHub App manager in your organization, you can grant them access to manage the settings of some or all GitHub App registrations owned by the organization. The GitHub App manager role does not grant users access to install and uninstall GitHub Apps on an organization. For more information, see "Adding and removing GitHub App managers in your organization."

Outside collaborators

To keep your organization's data secure while allowing access to repositories, you can add outside collaborators. An outside collaborator is a person who has access to one or more organization repositories but is not explicitly a member of the organization, such as a consultant or temporary employee.

Managing outside collaborators

To manage access to repositories for outside collaborators, see:

• "Adding outside collaborators to repositories in your organization"
• "Converting an organization member to an outside collaborator"
• "Removing an outside collaborator from an organization repository"

To control who can add outside collaborators to repositories, see:

• "Setting permissions for adding outside collaborators"
• "Enforcing repository management policies in your enterprise"

Permissions for organization roles

Further reading

• "Repository roles for an organization"
• "Project (classic) permissions for an organization"