Creating a custom security configuration

Build a custom security configuration to meet the specific security needs of repositories in your organization.

Who can use this feature?

Organization owners, security managers, and organization members with the admin role

In this article

About custom security configurations

We recommend securing your organization with the GitHub-recommended security configuration, then evaluating the security findings on your repositories before configuring custom security configurations. For more information, see "Applying the GitHub-recommended security configuration in your organization."

With custom security configurations, you can create collections of enablement settings for GitHub's security products to meet the specific security needs of your organization. For example, you can create a different custom security configuration for each group of repositories to reflect their different levels of visibility, risk tolerance, and impact.

Creating a custom security configuration

Note: The enablement status of some security features is dependent on other, higher-level security features. For example, disabling dependency graph will also disable Dependabot, vulnerability exposure analysis, and security updates. For security configurations, dependent security features are indicated with indentation and .

In the upper-right corner of GitHub, select your profile photo, then click Your organizations.
Under your organization name, click Settings. If you cannot see the "Settings" tab, select the dropdown menu, then click Settings.
In the "Security" section of the sidebar, select the Code security dropdown menu, then click Configurations.
In the "Code security configurations" section, click New configuration.
To help identify your custom security configuration and clarify its purpose on the "Code security configurations" page, name your configuration and create a description.
In the "GitHub Advanced Security features" row, choose whether to include or exclude GitHub Advanced Security (GHAS) features. If you plan to apply a custom security configuration with GHAS features to private repositories, you must have available GHAS licenses for each active unique committer to those repositories, or the features will not be enabled. See "About billing for GitHub Advanced Security."
In the "Dependency graph" section of the security settings table, choose whether you want to enable, disable, or keep the existing settings for the following security features:
- Dependency graph. To learn about dependency graph, see "About the dependency graph."
- Automatic dependency submission. To learn about automatic dependency submission, see "Configuring automatic dependency submission for your repository."
- Dependabot. To learn about Dependabot, see "About Dependabot alerts."
- Security updates. To learn about security updates, see "About Dependabot security updates."
Note: You cannot manually change the enablement settings for vulnerable function calls. If GitHub Advanced Security features and Dependabot alerts are enabled, vulnerable function calls is also enabled. Otherwise, it is disabled.
In the "Code scanning" section of the security settings table, choose whether you want to enable, disable, or keep the existing settings for code scanning default setup. To learn about default setup, see "Configuring default setup for code scanning."
In the "Secret scanning" section of the security settings table, choose whether you want to enable, disable, or keep the existing settings for the following security features:
- Secret scanning. To learn about secret scanning, see "About secret scanning."
- Push protection. To learn about push protection, see "About push protection."
In the "Private vulnerability reporting" section of the security settings table, choose whether you want to enable, disable, or keep the existing settings for private vulnerability reporting. To learn about private vulnerability reporting, see "Configuring private vulnerability reporting for a repository."
Optionally, in the "Policy" section, you can choose to automatically apply the security configuration to newly created repositories depending on their visibility. Select the None dropdown menu, then click Public, or Private and internal, or both.

Note: The default security configuration for an organization is only automatically applied to new repositories created in your organization. If a repository is transferred into your organization, you will still need to apply an appropriate security configuration to the repository manually.
Optionally, in the "Policy" section, you can enforce the configuration and block repository owners from changing features that are enabled or disabled by the configuration (features that are not set aren't enforced). Next to "Enforce configuration", select Enforce from the dropdown menu.
Note

If a user in your organization attempts to change the enablement status of a feature in an enforced configuration using the REST API, the API call will appear to succeed, but no enablement statuses will change.

Some situations can break the enforcement of security configurations for a repository. For example, the enablement of code scanning will not apply to a repository if:
- GitHub Actions is initially enabled on the repository, but is then disabled in the repository.
- GitHub Actions required by code scanning configurations are not available in the repository.
- The definition for which languages should not be analyzed using code scanning default setup is changed.
To finish creating your custom security configuration, click Save configuration.

Next steps

To apply your custom security configuration to repositories in your organization, see "Applying a custom security configuration."

To learn how to edit your custom security configuration, see "Editing a custom security configuration."