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Verifying or approving a domain for your enterprise

You can verify your ownership of domains with GitHub to confirm the identity of organizations owned by your enterprise account. You can also approve domains where organization members can receive email notifications.

Who can use this feature?

Enterprise owners can verify or approve a domain for an enterprise account.

Verification and approval of domains is available with GitHub Enterprise Cloud and GitHub Enterprise Server. For more information, see "GitHub’s plans."

In this article

About verification of domains

You can confirm that the websites and email addresses listed on the profiles of any organization owned by your enterprise account are controlled by your enterprise by verifying the domains. Verified domains for an enterprise account apply to every organization owned by the enterprise account.

After you verify ownership of your enterprise account's domains, a "Verified" badge will display on the profile of each organization that has the domain listed on its profile. To display a "Verified" badge, the website and email information shown on an organization's profile must match the verified domain or domains. If the website and email address shown on your organization's profile are hosted on different domains, you must verify both domains. If the website and email address use variants of the same domain, you must verify both variants. For example, if the profile shows the website www.example.com and the email address info@example.com, you would need to verify both www.example.com and example.com.

For domains configured at the enterprise level, enterprise owners can verify the identity of organization members by viewing each member's email address within the verified domain. Enterprise owners can also view a list of enterprise members who don't have an email address from a verified domain associated with their user account on GitHub. For more information, see "Viewing people in your enterprise."

After you verify domains for your enterprise account, you can restrict email notifications to verified domains for all the organizations owned by your enterprise account. For more information, see "Restricting email notifications for your enterprise."

Even if you don't restrict email notifications for the enterprise account, if an organization owner has restricted email notifications for the organization, organization members will be able to receive notifications at any domains verified or approved for the enterprise account, in addition to any domains verified or approved for the organization. For more information about restricting notifications for an organization, see "Restricting email notifications for your organization."

Organization owners can also verify additional domains for their organizations. For more information, see "Verifying or approving a domain for your organization."

About approval of domains

Note: The ability to approve a domain not owned by your organization or enterprise is currently in beta and subject to change.

If you want to allow members to receive email notifications at a domain you don't own, you can approve the domain, then allow GitHub to send email notifications to addresses within the domain. For example, you can allow a contractor who doesn't have an email address within your own domain to receive email notifications at a domain you feel comfortable with.

After you approve domains for your enterprise account, you can restrict email notifications for activity within your enterprise account to users with verified email addresses within verified or approved domains. For more information, see "Restricting email notifications for your enterprise."

Organization owners cannot see the email address or which user account is associated with an email address from an approved domain.

Organization owners can also approve additional domains for their organizations. For more information, see "Verifying or approving a domain for your organization."

Verifying a domain for your enterprise account

To verify your enterprise account's domain, you must have access to modify domain records with your domain hosting service.

  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 Settings.

  3. Under "Settings", click Verified & approved domains.

  4. Next to "Verified & approved domains for your enterprise account", click Add a domain.

  5. Under "What domain would you like to add?", type the domain you'd like to verify, then click Add domain.

  6. Follow the instructions under "Add a DNS TXT record" to create a DNS TXT record with your domain hosting service.

  7. Wait for your DNS configuration to change, which may take up to 72 hours. You can confirm your DNS configuration has changed by running the dig command on the command line, replacing ENTERPRISE-ACCOUNT with the name of your enterprise account, and example.com with the domain you'd like to verify. You should see your new TXT record listed in the command output.

    dig _github-challenge-ENTERPRISE-ACCOUNT.DOMAIN-NAME +nostats +nocomments +nocmd TXT

  8. After confirming your TXT record is added to your DNS, follow steps one through four above to navigate to your enterprise account's approved and verified domains.

  9. To the right of the domain that's pending verification, click , then click Continue verifying.

    Screenshot of the list of verified and approved domains for your enterprise. A dropdown menu labeled with three dots is expanded and highlighted with an orange outline, along with the "Continue verifying domain" option.

  10. Click Verify.

  11. Optionally, after the "Verified" badge is visible on your organizations' profiles, delete the TXT entry from the DNS record at your domain hosting service.

Approving a domain for your enterprise account

Note: The ability to approve a domain not owned by your organization or enterprise is currently in beta and subject to change.

  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 Settings.

  3. Under "Settings", click Verified & approved domains.

  4. Next to "Verified & approved domains for your enterprise account", click Add a domain.

  5. Under "What domain would you like to add?", type the domain you'd like to verify, then click Add domain.

  6. To the right of "Can't verify this domain?", click Approve it instead.

    Screenshot of the "Verify domain" page. To the right of the "Verify" button, a link, labeled "Approve it instead," is outlined in dark orange.

  7. Read the information about domain approval, then click Approve DOMAIN.

Removing an approved or verified domain

  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 Settings.

  3. Under "Settings", click Verified & approved domains.

  4. To the right of the domain to remove, select the dropdown menu, then click Delete.

    Screenshot of the "Verified & approved domains" page. To the right of a domain, a kebab icon is outlined in dark orange.