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Repository roles for an organization

You can customize access to each repository in your organization by assigning granular roles, giving people access to the features and tasks they need.

Repository roles for organizations

You can give organization members, outside collaborators, and teams of people different levels of access to repositories owned by an organization by assigning them to roles. Choose the role that best fits each person or team's function in your project without giving people more access to the project than they need.

From least access to most access, the roles for an organization repository are:

  • Read: Recommended for non-code contributors who want to view or discuss your project
  • Triage: Recommended for contributors who need to proactively manage issues, discussions, and pull requests without write access
  • Write: Recommended for contributors who actively push to your project
  • Maintain: Recommended for project managers who need to manage the repository without access to sensitive or destructive actions
  • Admin: Recommended for people who need full access to the project, including sensitive and destructive actions like managing security or deleting a repository

If your organization uses GitHub Enterprise Cloud, you can create custom repository roles. For more information, see "Managing custom repository roles for an organization" in the GitHub Enterprise Cloud documentation.

Organization owners can set base permissions that apply to all members of an organization when accessing any of the organization's repositories. For more information, see "Setting base permissions for an organization."

Organization owners can also choose to further limit access to certain settings and actions across the organization. For more information on options for specific settings, see "Managing organization settings."

In addition to managing organization-level settings, organization owners have admin access to every repository owned by the organization. For more information, see "Roles in an organization."

Warning: When someone adds a deploy key to a repository, any user who has the private key can read from or write to the repository (depending on the key settings), even if they're later removed from the organization.

Permissions for each role

Some of the features listed below are limited to organizations using GitHub Enterprise Cloud. For more information about how you can try GitHub Enterprise Cloud for free, see "Setting up a trial of GitHub Enterprise Cloud."

Note: The roles required to use security features are listed in "Access requirements for security features" below.

Repository actionReadTriageWriteMaintainAdmin
Manage individual, team, and outside collaborator access to the repository
Pull from the person or team's assigned repositories
Fork the person or team's assigned repositories
Edit and delete their own comments
Open issues
Close issues they opened themselves
Reopen issues they closed themselves
Have an issue assigned to them
Send pull requests from forks of the team's assigned repositories
Submit reviews on pull requests
Approve or request changes to a pull request with required reviews
Apply suggested changes to pull requests
View published releases
View GitHub Actions workflow runs
Edit wikis in public repositories
Edit wikis in private repositories
Report abusive or spammy content
Apply/dismiss labels
Create, edit, delete labels
Close, reopen, and assign all issues and pull requests
Enable and disable auto-merge on a pull request
Apply milestones
Mark duplicate issues and pull requests
Request pull request reviews
Merge a pull request
Push to (write) the person or team's assigned repositories
Edit and delete anyone's comments on commits, pull requests, and issues
Hide anyone's comments
Transfer issues (see "Transferring an issue to another repository" for details)
Act as a designated code owner for a repository
Mark a draft pull request as ready for review
Convert a pull request to a draft
Create status checks
Create, edit, run, re-run, and cancel GitHub Actions workflows
Create, update, and delete GitHub Actions secrets
Create and edit releases
View draft releases
Edit a repository's description
View and install packages
Publish packages
Delete and restore packages
Manage topics
Enable wikis and restrict wiki editors
Enable projects (classic)
Configure pull request merges
Configure a publishing source for GitHub Pages
View content exclusion settings for GitHub Copilot
Manage branch protection rules and repository rulesets
View rulesets for a repository
Push to protected branches
Merge pull requests on protected branches, even if there are no approving reviews
Create tags that match a tag protection rule
Delete tags that match a tag protection rule
Create and edit repository social cards
Limit interactions in a repository
Delete an issue (see "Deleting an issue")
Define code owners for a repository
Add a repository to a team (see "Managing team access to an organization repository" for details)
Manage outside collaborator access to a repository
Change a repository's visibility
Make a repository a template (see "Creating a template repository")
Change a repository's settings
Manage team and collaborator access to the repository
Edit the repository's default branch
Rename the repository's default branch (see "Renaming a branch")
Rename a branch other than the repository's default branch (see "Renaming a branch")
Manage webhooks and deploy keys
Manage the forking policy for a repository
Transfer repositories into the organization
Delete or transfer repositories out of the organization
Archive repositories
Display a sponsor button (see "Displaying a sponsor button in your repository")
Create autolink references to external resources, like Jira or Zendesk (see "Configuring autolinks to reference external resources")
Enable GitHub Discussions in a repository
Create and edit categories for GitHub Discussions
Move a discussion to a different category
Manage pinned discussions
Convert issues to discussions in bulk
Lock and unlock discussions
Individually convert issues to discussions
Create new discussions and comment on existing discussions
Delete a discussion
Create codespaces for private repositories
Create codespaces for public repositories

Access requirements for security features

In this section, you can find the access required for security features, such as Advanced Security features.

Note: Repository writers and maintainers can only see secret scanning alert information for their own commits.

Further reading