Managing GitHub Advanced Security features for your enterprise

You can control GitHub Advanced Security features that secure and analyze code across all organizations owned by your enterprise.

Who can use this feature?

Enterprise owners can manage Advanced Security features for organizations in an enterprise.

In this article

About management of Advanced Security features

You can use Advanced Security features to harden security for the organizations in your enterprise.

You can quickly enable security features at scale with the GitHub-recommended security configuration, a collection of security enablement settings you can apply to repositories in an organization. You can then further customize GitHub Advanced Security features at the organization level with global settings. See About enabling security features at scale.

To manage individual GitHub Advanced Security features, you can enable or disable each feature for all existing and/or new repositories within the organizations owned by your enterprise.

You can also enable or disable Advanced Security features via the API. For more information, see REST API endpoints for secret scanning in the REST API documentation.

For information about buying a license for GitHub Advanced Security, see Signing up for GitHub Advanced Security.

If you have disallowed GitHub Advanced Security for an organization, that organization will not be affected by enabling a feature for all existing repositories or for all new repositories. For more information about disallowing GitHub Advanced Security for an organization, see Enforcing policies for code security and analysis for your enterprise.

When you enable one or more security and analysis features for existing repositories, you will see any results displayed on GitHub within minutes.

If you enable security and analysis features, GitHub performs read-only analysis on your repository.

Managing Advanced Security features

Note

If you enable GitHub Advanced Security, active committers to these repositories will use GitHub Advanced Security licenses. This option is deactivated if you have exceeded your license capacity. See "About billing for GitHub Advanced Security."

  1. In the top-right corner of GitHub, click your profile photo.

  2. Depending on your environment, click Your enterprise, or click Your enterprises then click the enterprise you want to view.

  3. On the left side of the page, in the enterprise account sidebar, click Settings.

  4. In the left sidebar, click Code security.

  5. Optionally, enable or disable a feature for all existing repositories.

    • To the right of the feature, click Disable all or Enable all. If the control for "GitHub Advanced Security" is disabled, you have no available licenses for GitHub Advanced Security.
    • To confirm the change, click the Enable/Disable all or Enable/Disable for eligible repositories button in the dialog that is displayed.

  6. Optionally, to enable or disable a feature automatically when new private and internal repositories, user namespace repositories belonging to Enterprise Managed Users, or public repositories and repositories with GitHub Advanced Security enabled are created, select the checkbox below the feature.

  7. Optionally, to include a resource link in the message that members will see when they attempt to push a secret, select Add a resource link in the CLI and web UI when a commit is blocked, then type a URL, and click Save link.

    Note

    When a custom link is configured for an organization, the organization-level value overrides the custom link set for the enterprise. See About push protection.

    Screenshot of the "Push protection" section of the settings for security and analysis features. The checkbox and the text field used for enabling a custom link are outlined in dark orange.