Getting started with GitHub AE

This guide will walk you through setting up, configuring, and managing settings for your enterprise on GitHub AE as an enterprise owner. For more information about GitHub AE, see "About GitHub AE."

Part 1: Setting up GitHub AE

To get started with GitHub AE, you can create your enterprise account, initialize GitHub AE, configure an IP allow list, configure user authentication and provisioning, and manage billing for your enterprise.

1. Creating your GitHub AE enterprise account

You will first need to purchase GitHub AE. For more information, contact GitHub's Sales team.

After you purchase GitHub AE, we'll ask you to provide an email address and username for the person you want to initialize the enterprise. Your dedicated technical account manager in GitHub Enterprise Support will create an account for the enterprise owner and send the enterprise owner an email to log into GitHub AE and complete the initialization.

2. Initializing GitHub AE

After GitHub creates the owner account for your enterprise on GitHub AE, you will receive an email to sign in and complete the initialization. During initialization, you, as the enterprise owner, will name your enterprise, configure SAML SSO, create policies for all organizations in your enterprise, and configure a support contact for your enterprise members. For more information, see "Initializing GitHub AE."

3. Restricting network traffic

You can configure an allow list for specific IP addresses to restrict access to assets owned by organizations in your enterprise account. For more information, see "Restricting network traffic to your enterprise with an IP allow list."

4. Managing identity and access for your enterprise

You can centrally manage access to your enterprise on GitHub AE from an identity provider (IdP) using SAML single sign-on (SSO) for user authentication and System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM) for user provisioning. Once you configure provisioning, you can assign or unassign users to the application from the IdP, creating or disabling user accounts in the enterprise. For more information, see "About SAML for enterprise IAM."

5. Managing billing for your enterprise

Owners of the subscription for your enterprise on GitHub AE can view billing details for GitHub AE in the Azure portal. For more information, see "About billing for your enterprise."

Part 2: Organizing and managing enterprise members

As an enterprise owner for GitHub AE, you can manage settings on user, repository, team, and organization levels. You can manage members of your enterprise, create and manage organizations, set policies for repository management, and create and manage teams.

1. Managing members of your enterprise

You can manage settings and audit activity for the members of your enterprise. You can manage dormant users, view the audit log for user activity, and customize messages that enterprise members will see. For more information, see "Managing users in your enterprise."

2. Creating organizations

You can create new organizations in your enterprise to reflect your company or group's structure. For more information, see "Creating a new organization from scratch."

3. Adding members to organizations

You can add members to organizations in your enterprise as long as you are an organization owner in the organizations you want to manage. You can also configure visibility of organization membership. For more information, see "Adding people to your organization" and "Configuring visibility for organization membership."

4. Creating teams

Teams are groups of organization members that can be granted permissions to specific repositories as a group. You can create individual teams or multiple levels of nested teams in each of your organizations. For more information, see "Creating a team" and "Adding organization members to a team."

5. Setting organization and repository permission levels

We recommend giving a limited number of members in each organization an organization owner role, which provides complete administrative access for that organization. For more information, see "Roles in an organization."

For organizations where you have admin permissions, you can also customize access to each repository with granular permission levels. For more information, see "Repository roles for an organization."

6. Enforcing repository management policies

As an enterprise owner, you can set repository management policies for all organizations in your enterprise, or allow policies to be set separately in each organization. For more information, see "Enforcing repository management policies in your enterprise."

Part 3: Building securely

To increase the security of your enterprise, you can monitor your enterprise and configure security and analysis features for your organizations.

1. Monitoring your enterprise

You can monitor your enterprise with your activity dashboard and audit logging. For more information, see "Monitoring activity in your enterprise."

2. Configuring security features for your organizations

To keep the organizations in your enterprise secure, you can use a variety of GitHub security features, including security policies, dependency graphs, secret scanning and Dependabot security and version updates. For more information, see "Securing your organization" and "Managing security and analysis settings for your organization."

Part 4: Customizing and automating work on your enterprise

You can customize and automate work in organizations in your enterprise with the GitHub AE API, GitHub Actions, and GitHub Pages.

1. Using the GitHub AE API

There are two versions of the GitHub AE API: the REST API and the GraphQL API. You can use the GitHub AE APIs to automate common tasks, back up your data, or create integrations that extend GitHub AE. For more information, see "Comparing GitHub's REST API and GraphQL API."

2. Building GitHub Actions

With GitHub Actions, you can automate and customize your enterprise's development workflow on GitHub AE. You can create your own actions, and use and customize actions shared by the GitHub community. For more information, see "Learn GitHub Actions."

For more information on enabling and configuring GitHub Actions for GitHub AE, see "Getting started with GitHub Actions for GitHub AE."

3. Using GitHub Pages

GitHub Pages is a static site hosting service that takes HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files straight from a repository and publishes a website. You can enable or disable GitHub Pages for your enterprise members at the organization level. For more information, see "Configuring GitHub Pages for your enterprise" and "About GitHub Pages."