Enabling push protection for your repository

With push protection, secret scanning blocks contributors from pushing secrets to a repository and generates an alert whenever a contributor bypasses the block.

Who can use this feature?

Repository owners, organization owners, security managers, and users with the admin role

In this article

About enabling push protection

To enable push protection for a repository, you must first enable secret scanning. You can then enable push protection in the repository's "Code security" settings page following the steps outlined in this article.

You can additionally enable push protection for your own personal account, which prevents you from pushing secrets to any public repository on GitHub. For more information, see Push protection for users.

If you're an organization owner, you can enable push protection for multiple repositories at a time using security configurations. For more information, see About enabling security features at scale.

Organization owners, security managers, and repository administrators can also enable push protection for secret scanning via the API. For more information, see REST API endpoints for repositories and expand the "Properties of the security_and_analysis object" section.

Enabling push protection for a repository

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

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

    Screenshot of a repository header showing the tabs. The "Settings" tab is highlighted by a dark orange outline.

  3. In the "Security" section of the sidebar, click Code security.

  4. Under "Code security", find "GitHub Advanced Security."

  5. Under "Secret scanning", under "Push protection", click Enable.

Further reading