Skip to main content

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.

About enterprise policies

With enterprise policies, you can manage the policies for all the organizations owned by your enterprise.

To help you enforce business rules and regulatory compliance, policies provide a single point of management for all the organizations owned by an enterprise account.

Each enterprise policy controls the options available for a policy at the organization level. You can choose to not enforce a policy, which allows organization owners to configure the policy for the organization, or you can choose from a set of options to enforce for all organizations owned by your enterprise.

For example, with the "Base permissions" policy, you can allow organization owners to configure the "Base permissions" policy for their organization, or you can enforce a specific base permissions level, such as "Read", for all organizations within the enterprise.

Enforcing policies

By default, no enterprise policies are enforced. To identify policies that should be enforced to meet the unique requirements of your business, we recommend reviewing all the available policies in your enterprise account, starting with repository management policies.

While you're configuring enterprise policies, to help you understand the impact of changing each policy, you can view the current configurations for the organizations owned by your enterprise.

For a full list of repository management policies, see Enforcing repository management policies in your enterprise.

Another way to enforce standards within your enterprise is to use pre-receive hooks, which are scripts that run on your GitHub Enterprise Server instance to implement quality checks. For more information, see Enforcing policy with pre-receive hooks.

Further reading