This version of GitHub Enterprise Server was discontinued on 2024-09-25. No patch releases will be made, even for critical security issues. For better performance, improved security, and new features, upgrade to the latest version of GitHub Enterprise Server. For help with the upgrade, contact GitHub Enterprise support.

Enabling automatic user license sync for your enterprise

You can manage license usage across your GitHub Enterprise environments by automatically syncing user licenses from your GitHub Enterprise Server instance to GitHub Enterprise Cloud.

Who can use this feature?

Enterprise owners can enable automatic user license synchronization.

In this article

About automatic license synchronization

GitHub uses a unique-user licensing model. With the GitHub Enterprise plan, you're entitled to use both GitHub Enterprise Cloud and GitHub Enterprise Server. Your GitHub Enterprise Cloud allowance includes one deployment, on either GitHub.com or GHE.com.

GitHub determines how many licensed seats you're consuming based on the number of unique users across your deployments. Each user only consumes one license, no matter how many GitHub Enterprise Server instances the user uses, or how many organizations the user is a member of on your GitHub Enterprise Cloud deployment. This model allows each person to use multiple GitHub Enterprise deployments without incurring extra costs.

For a person using multiple GitHub Enterprise environments to only consume a single license, you must synchronize license usage between environments. Then, GitHub will deduplicate users based on the email addresses associated with their user accounts. GitHub deduplicates licenses for the GitHub Enterprise plan itself, but not for other GitHub products. For more information, see Troubleshooting license usage for GitHub Enterprise. For more information, see About GitHub Connect.

If you enable automatic user license sync for your enterprise, every week, GitHub Connect will automatically synchronize license usage between GitHub Enterprise Server and your enterprise on GitHub.com. You can also synchronize your license data at any time outside of the automatic weekly sync, by manually triggering a license sync job. For more information, see Syncing license usage between GitHub Enterprise Server and GitHub Enterprise Cloud.

If you use multiple GitHub Enterprise Server instances, you can enable automatic license sync between each of your instances and the same enterprise account on GitHub Enterprise Cloud.

After you synchronize license usage, you can see a report of consumed licenses across all your environments in the enterprise settings on GitHub Enterprise Cloud. For more information, see Viewing license usage for GitHub Enterprise.

You can also manually upload GitHub Enterprise Server user license information to GitHub Enterprise Cloud. For more information, see Syncing license usage between GitHub Enterprise Server and GitHub Enterprise Cloud.

Note

To make troubleshooting easier, if you synchronize license usage and do not use Enterprise Managed Users, we highly recommend enabling verified domains for your enterprise account on GitHub Enterprise Cloud. See Verifying or approving a domain for your enterprise in the GitHub Enterprise Cloud documentation.

Enabling license synchronization

Before enabling license synchronization on your GitHub Enterprise Server instance, you must enable GitHub Connect. See Enabling GitHub Connect for GitHub.com.

  1. In the top-right corner of GitHub Enterprise Server, click your profile photo, then click Enterprise settings.

    Screenshot of the drop-down menu that appears when you click the profile photo on GitHub Enterprise Server. The "Enterprise settings" option is highlighted in a dark orange outline.

  2. In the enterprise account sidebar, click GitHub Connect.

  3. To the right of "License sync", click Enable.

    Screenshot of the "License sync" option on the GitHub Connect page. The "Enable" button is highlighted with an orange outline.