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Restricting repository visibility changes in your organization

To protect your organization's data, you can configure permissions for changing repository visibility in your organization.

Who can use this feature?

Organization owners can restrict repository visibility changes for an organization.

You can restrict who has the ability to change the visibility of repositories in your organization, such as changing a repository from private to public. For more information about repository visibility, see "About repositories."

You can restrict the ability to change repository visibility to organization owners only, or you can allow anyone with admin access to a repository to change visibility.

Restricting who has the ability to change the visibility of repositories in your organization helps prevent sensitive information from being exposed. For more information, see "Best practices for preventing data leaks in your organization."

Warning: If this setting is enabled, individuals or GitHub Apps with admin access can modify the visibility of an existing repository even if the ability to create a repository with that specific visibility has been disabled. For more information about restricting the visibility of repositories during creation, see "Restricting repository creation in your organization."

  1. In the upper-right corner of GitHub.com, select your profile photo, then click Your organizations.

    Screenshot of the dropdown menu under @octocat's profile picture. "Your organizations" is outlined in dark orange.

  2. Next to the organization, click Settings.

  3. In the "Access" section of the sidebar, click Member privileges.

  4. Under "Repository visibility change", deselect Allow members to change repository visibilities for this organization.

  5. Click Save.