Disabling or limiting GitHub Actions for your organization

About GitHub Actions permissions for your organization

By default, after GitHub Actions is enabled on your GitHub Enterprise Server instance, it is enabled on all repositories and organizations. You can choose to disable GitHub Actions or limit them to local actions only, which means that people can only use actions that exist in your repository. For more information about GitHub Actions, see "About GitHub Actions."

You can enable GitHub Actions for all repositories in your organization. When you enable GitHub Actions, workflows are able to run actions located within your repository and any other public or internal repository. You can disable GitHub Actions for all repositories in your organization. When you disable GitHub Actions, no workflows run in your repository.

Alternatively, you can enable GitHub Actions for all repositories in your organization but limit the actions a workflow can run. When you enable local actions only, workflows can only run actions located in your repository, organization, or enterprise.

Managing GitHub Actions permissions for your organization

You can disable all workflows for an organization or set a policy that configures which actions can be used in an organization.

If you choose Allow select actions, local actions are allowed, and there are additional options for allowing other specific actions. For more information, see "Allowing specific actions to run."

When you allow local actions only, the policy blocks all access to actions authored by GitHub. For example, the actions/checkout action would not be accessible.

1. In the top right corner of GitHub Enterprise Server, click your profile photo, then click Your organizations.
2. Next to the organization, click Settings.
3. In the left sidebar, click Actions.
4. Under Policies, select an option.
5. Click Save.

Allowing specific actions to run

When you choose Allow select actions, local actions are allowed, and there are additional options for allowing other specific actions:

• Allow actions created by GitHub: You can allow all actions created by GitHub to be used by workflows. Actions created by GitHub are located in the actions and github organizations. For more information, see the actions and github organizations.

• Allow specified actions: You can restrict workflows to use actions in specific organizations and repositories.

  To restrict access to specific tags or commit SHAs of an action, use the same <OWNER>/<REPO>@<TAG OR SHA> syntax used in the workflow to select the action. For example, actions/javascript-action@v1.0.1 to select a tag or actions/javascript-action@172239021f7ba04fe7327647b213799853a9eb89 to select a SHA. For more information, see "Finding and customizing actions."

  You can use the * wildcard character to match patterns. For example, to allow all actions in organizations that start with space-org, you can specify space-org*/*. To add all actions in repositories that start with octocat, you can use */octocat*@*. For more information about using the * wildcard, see "Workflow syntax for GitHub Actions."

This procedure demonstrates how to add specific actions to the allow list.

1. In the top right corner of GitHub Enterprise Server, click your profile photo, then click Your organizations.
2. Next to the organization, click Settings.
3. In the left sidebar, click Actions.
4. Under Policies, select Allow select actions and add your required actions to the list.
5. Click Save.

Enabling workflows for private repository forks

If you rely on using forks of your private repositories, you can configure policies that control how users can run workflows on pull_request events. Available to private and internal repositories only, you can configure these policy settings for your enterprise, organizations, or repositories.

If a policy is disabled for an enterprise, it cannot be enabled for organizations. If a policy is disabled for an organization, it cannot be enabled for repositories. If an organization enables a policy, the policy can be disabled for individual repositories.

• Run workflows from fork pull requests - Allows users to run workflows from fork pull requests, using a GITHUB_TOKEN with read-only permission, and with no access to secrets.
• Send write tokens to workflows from pull requests - Allows pull requests from forks to use a GITHUB_TOKEN with write permission.
• Send secrets to workflows from pull requests - Makes all secrets available to the pull request.

Configuring the private fork policy for an organization

1. In the top right corner of GitHub Enterprise Server, click your profile photo, then click Your organizations.
2. Next to the organization, click Settings.
3. In the left sidebar, click Actions.
4. Under Fork pull request workflows, select your options. For example:
5. Click Save to apply the settings.