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GitHub Actions

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Sharing workflows, secrets, and runners with your organization

In this article

Learn how you can use organization features to collaborate with your team, by sharing starter workflows, secrets, and self-hosted runners.

Note: GitHub-hosted runners are not currently supported on GitHub Enterprise Server. You can see more information about planned future support on the GitHub public roadmap.

Overview

If you need to share workflows and other GitHub Actions features with your team, then consider collaborating within a GitHub organization. An organization allows you to centrally store and manage secrets, artifacts, and self-hosted runners. You can also create starter workflows in the .github repository and share them with other users in your organization.

Sharing workflows

Your organization can share workflows by reusing the workflows exactly or by creating starter workflows that provide templates for new workflows.

Reusing workflows

You can share workflows with your organization, publicly or privately, by calling one workflow from within another workflow. This allows you to reuse workflows, avoiding duplication and making your workflows easier to maintain. For more information, see "Reusing workflows."

Using starter workflows

Starter workflows allow everyone in your organization who has permission to create workflows to do so more quickly and easily. When you create a new workflow, you can choose a starter workflow and some or all of the work of writing the workflow will be done for you. You can use starter workflows as a starting place to build your custom workflow or use them as-is. This not only saves time, it promotes consistency and best practice across your organization. For more information, see "Creating starter workflows for your organization."

Sharing secrets within an organization

You can centrally manage your secrets within an organization, and then make them available to selected repositories. This also means that you can update a secret in one location, and have the change apply to all repository workflows that use it.

When creating a secret in an organization, you can use a policy to limit which repositories can access it. For example, you can grant access to all repositories, or limit access to only private repositories or a specified list of repositories.

To create secrets at the organization level, you must have admin access.

  1. On your GitHub Enterprise Server instance, navigate to the main page of the organization.

  2. Under your organization name, click Settings. If you cannot see the "Settings" tab, select the dropdown menu, then click Settings.

    Screenshot of the horizontal navigation bar for an organization. The "Settings" tab is outlined in dark orange.

  3. In the left sidebar, click Secrets.

  4. Click New secret.

  5. Type a name for your secret in the Name input box.

  6. Enter the Value for your secret.

  7. From the Repository access dropdown list, choose an access policy.

  8. Click Add secret.

Share self-hosted runners within an organization

Organization admins can add their self-hosted runners to groups, and then create policies that control which repositories can access the group.

For more information, see "Managing access to self-hosted runners using groups."

Next steps

To continue learning about GitHub Actions, see "Creating starter workflows for your organization."