Github how to share private repository

Inviting collaborators to a personal repository

You can invite users to become collaborators to your personal repository.

If you’re using GitHub Free, you can add unlimited collaborators on public and private repositories.

Repositories owned by an organization can grant more granular access. For more information, see «Access permissions on GitHub.»

Pending invitations will expire after 7 days, restoring any unclaimed licenses.

If you’re a member of an enterprise with managed users, you can only invite other members of your enterprise to collaborate with you. For more information, see «Types of GitHub accounts.»

Note: GitHub limits the number of people who can be invited to a repository within a 24-hour period. If you exceed this limit, either wait 24 hours or create an organization to collaborate with more people.

Ask for the username of the person you’re inviting as a collaborator. If they don’t have a username yet, they can sign up for GitHub For more information, see «Signing up for a new GitHub account».

On GitHub.com, navigate to the main page of the repository.

Under your repository name, click

Settings.

In the «Access» section of the sidebar, click

In the search field, start typing the name of person you want to invite, then click a name in the list of matches.

Click Add NAME to REPOSITORY.

The user will receive an email inviting them to the repository. Once they accept your invitation, they will have collaborator access to your repository.

8 ways to share your git repository

Preparation:Git enable a simple project-X

Let’s say you have project called project-X that you have been working on, on your local machine. It contains one file called README.
To enable git on this project you can:

Share it over a file share

Instead of having people reference your local repository, you can put your repository on a file share.
Let’s say we have share path /share/git/ where we want to put our project-X

Preparing the repository

Pushing your local repository to the shared repository

Share using git-daemon

Installing git-daemon
Git includes a simple daemon that you use to share your project using the git protocol.
On Centos,Redhat this seems to required another package: More detail can be found http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-daemon.html
This creates a network listener on the GIT port. It allows by default read access to git projects.

Prepare the repository
To allow git-daemon to read your project you have to add the file .git/git-daemon-export-ok to your project.

Controlling access
Git daemon has no notion of users. By default is allows read to everybody, if you want to give write access, then you have to enable it to everybody anonymously.
This is what makes is less suitable for controlling access.
If you try to update you receive the following erors:
Accessing the repository

Share using ssh server

Share using git-daemon

Starting the daemin
Git includes a simple daemon that you use to share your project using the git protocol.
More detail can be found http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-daemon.html
This creates a network listener on the GIT port. It allows by default read access to git projects.
Prepare the repository
To allow git-daemon to read your project you have to add the file .git/git-daemon-export-ok to your project.

Controlling access
Git daemon has no notion of users. By default is allows read to everybody, if you want to give write access, then you have to enable it to everybody anonymously.
This is what makes is less suitable for controlling access.
If you try to update you receive the following erors:
Accessing the repository

Share using ssh server

Sharing over ssh is similar to sharing it over a filesystem.
Preparing the repository

Pushing your local repository to the shared repository
Controlling access
To have access, all users must have an account on the ssh server. So that means user-add for each user.
Permissions are handled by filesystem permissions. You could create two groups: project-X-read, project-X-write.
To set these different group permissions you would use the set To set these different group permissions you would use the setfacl command on linux or the chmod +a on MacOSX
You could off course have multiple keys to one account, but this would not allow you to differentiate between different rights

How can I give access to a private GitHub repository?

I have a private git repository and I would like to extend its access to a member of my team. Will I be able to do it through the Github website? I have the username of my member.

I have tried to do this by going through the admin page of the repository but there isn’t such an option as I am not the owner.

8 Answers 8

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If you are the owner it is simple:

Then collaborator should visit this example repo link https://github.com/user/repo/invitations

It is a simple 3 Step Process :
1) Go to your private repo and click on settings
2) To the left of the screen click on Manage access
3) Then Click on Invite Collaborator

It is a simple 3 Step Process :

The invited user needs to be logged in to Github before clicking the invitation link in their email or they’ll get a 404 error.

Heres a screenshot of how to do it:

Two steps:
1. Login and click «Invite someone» in the right column under «People». Enter and select persons github id.
2. It will then give you the option to «Invite Username to some teams» at which point you simply check off which teams you want to add them to then click «Send Invitation»

Alternatively:
1. Get the persons github id (not their email)
2. Navigate to the repository you would like to add the user to
3. Click «Settings» in the right column (not the gearbox settings along the top)
4. Click Collaborators long the left column
5. Select the repository name
6. Where it reads «Invite or add users to team» add the persons github id
7. An invitation will then be e-mailed.

Please let me know how this worked for you!

It is a simple 3 Step Process :

It´s possible via Github Organizations. You have to create a new account.

It’s working in 2021,

Though the Repo has to be made private first then the click on
settings => Manage access => Invite Collaborator

The user who gets the repo access has to navigate to the repo and can make changes to the main branch.

Your team members must be accessing the repository using SSH & for that they have to have their ssh key mapped with github account. This will work if they map their ssh key with github account and also the repository has public rights, which they want to access.

How to share a project from private github repository?

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Go to Settings/Manage Access/Invite Colaborator

The private repos have a purpose which normally is to prohibit the public from accessing your source code. This means either as a company or as an individual you have a very serious reason you don’t want to share. That said, github only provides these two options (public/private repo). Specifically, for your case, what could work is inviting other members to be collaborators on that project by just giving them read rights (when you invite somebody as a collaborator you basically have two options: a) make them collaborators, which means they have read rights, b) make them owners of the repo, which means they have read write access).

My suggestion here is you should better upload this project in the cloud or in a web ide, make it accessible only for the people who have the link and share with them the link.

KevinSimper

At Connected Cars, we wanted to share private git repositories between projects and so we needed to authenticate with Github. In node.js you can put a git repository as the dependency and npm will know that it should do a git clone instead of fetching it from the npm repository.

So locally you will be able to use your own ssh key when you do npm install, so that is pretty easy.

There is, however, a problem with ssh keys with the ssh-agent and docker as you can not mount that socket inside the docker build process, so there are three solutions that could solve that problem:

You can add your ssh key inside the docker image and start an ssh-agent during the build.

It is generally not a good idea to move your ssh key around as it becomes more difficult to keep it safe. The docker image will however not leave your machine.

You can generate a private access token to use to authenticate with Github.

With that token, you can communicate with Github over HTTPS instead of SSH and it can be revoked. It has the benefit of being more likely to be shortlived by Github tokens can not be expired so it is nearly the same as SSH tokens. One thing to consider is that it is needed inside the package.json and you don’t want to commit it.

Do an npm install outside the docker build and rebuild any native dependencies.

This will solve the problem with not authenticating inside the build process but it makes it take more steps that have to be done in the correct order and it would require you to have the same version of the tool that installs the dependencies. A process that can run solely inside docker build can easier be debugged.

So there are solutions to authenticate with Github but no clear out of the box solution. So here solution we have now and how we solved it.

Build and continuous integration

On our build server, we have created a new GitHub user that has access to those repositories that other projects want to clone. With that user, we created a personal access token and stored that encrypted in Googles secret storage called KMS (Key Management Service). When the build is started, the key is fetched and decrypted and passed as an environment variable to the build process. The idea is that everybody that has access to builds does not need to know what the token and to avoid others to get a hold of it.

So this package url:

So explaining the command:

Passing Github Access Token to docker

And to make it easy for local testing with docker-compose it will be added like this:

Docker Images

We also want to have a base node.js image that will allow us to upgrade and easily customize the image we use and include the modified npm command. We also want to add custom scripts like the one doing the GitHub authentication so that it does not need to be fetched or copied into every project.

From that base image, there will be two images, one for build that will contain all the tools like a compiler for native dependencies and one for production that is slimmer and does not contain the tools for building.

So the main image will be called

That image will be tagged with the version of node. Then from that image there will be an image called:

which will contain as the official node.js docker image says it, has a large number of extremely common Debian packages

and the final image that will only have node.js to run it in production will be called:

Those two images can be used in conjunction with a docker multistage build, that is where you take the output of one container and put it into another container. This is to avoid having to extra packages that you don’t need in the final image.

Multi-stage builds

That meant with these changes to the docker images that we went from an image with the size of 1.2 GB to an image half the size on 600 MB.

Google Cloud Builder

You can read more about Google Cloud Builder here: https://cloud.google.com/container-builder/

The solution is quite simple but requires a lot of small pieces to come together and a few different environments to work and test, but the final solution is something that can be shared across the organization and scale securely as we add more awesome colleagues without compromising on security which is the most important thing.