Connecting a repository to a package

You can connect a repository to a package on GitHub.

Who can use this feature?

GitHub Packages is available with GitHub Free, GitHub Pro, GitHub Free for organizations, GitHub Team, GitHub Enterprise Cloud, and GitHub Enterprise Server 3.0 or higher.


GitHub Packages is not available for private repositories owned by accounts using legacy per-repository plans. Also, accounts using legacy per-repository plans cannot access registries that support granular permissions, because these accounts are billed by repository. Enterprise Managed Users do not have individual storage allocation to publish packages within their account's namespace, but can publish to an organization's namespace. For additional information on Enterprise Managed Users, see About Enterprise Managed Users. For the list of registries that support granular permissions, see About permissions for GitHub Packages. For more information, see GitHub’s plans.

In this article

When you publish a package that is scoped to a personal account or an organization, the package is not linked to a repository by default. If you connect a package to a repository, the package's landing page will show information and links from the repository, such as the README. You can also choose to have the package inherit its access permissions from the linked repository. For more information, see Configuring a package's access control and visibility.

Connecting a repository to a user-scoped package on GitHub

  1. On GitHub, navigate to the main page of your personal account.

  2. In the top right corner of GitHub, click your profile photo, then click Your profile.

    Screenshot of the dropdown menu under @octocat's profile picture. "Your profile" is outlined in dark orange.

  3. On your profile page, in the header, click the Packages tab.

  4. Search for and then click the name of the package that you want to manage.

  5. Under your package versions, click Connect repository.

  6. Select a repository to link to the package, then click Connect repository.

Connecting a repository to an organization-scoped package on GitHub

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

  2. Under your organization name, click the Packages tab.

    Screenshot of @octo-org's profile page. The "Packages" tab is highlighted with an orange outline.

  3. Search for and then click the name of the package that you want to manage.

  4. Under your package versions, click Connect repository.

  5. Select a repository to link to the package, then click Connect repository.

Connecting a repository to a container image using the command line

Note

If you publish a package that is linked to a repository, the package automatically inherits the access permissions of the linked repository, and GitHub Actions workflows in the linked repository automatically get access to the package, unless your organization has disabled automatic inheritance of access permissions. For more information, see "Configuring a package's access control and visibility."

  1. In your Dockerfile, add this line, replacing OWNER and REPO with your details:

    LABEL org.opencontainers.image.source=https://github.com/OWNER/REPO

    For example, if you're the user octocat and own my-repo you would add this line to your Dockerfile:

    LABEL org.opencontainers.image.source=https://github.com/octocat/my-repo

    For more information, see LABEL in the official Docker documentation and Pre-defined Annotation Keys in the opencontainers/image-spec repository.

  2. Build your container image. This example builds an image from the Dockerfile in the current directory and assigns the image name hello_docker.

    docker build -t hello_docker .

  3. Optionally, review the details of the Docker image you just created.

    $ docker images
> REPOSITORY          TAG         IMAGE ID       CREATED         SIZE
> hello_docker        latest      142e665b1faa   5 seconds ago   125MB
> redis               latest      afb5e116cac0   3 months ago    111MB
> alpine              latest      a6215f271958   5 months ago    5.29MB

  4. Assign a name and hosting destination to your Docker image.

    docker tag IMAGE_NAME ghcr.io/NAMESPACE/NEW_IMAGE_NAME:TAG

    Replace NAMESPACE with the name of the personal account or organization to which you want the package to be scoped.

    For example:

    docker tag 38f737a91f39 ghcr.io/octocat/hello_docker:latest

  5. If you haven't already, authenticate to the Container registry. For more information, see Working with the Container registry.

    $ echo $CR_PAT | docker login ghcr.io -u USERNAME --password-stdin
> Login Succeeded

  6. Push your container image to the Container registry.

    docker push ghcr.io/NAMESPACE/IMAGE-NAME:TAG

    For example:

    docker push ghcr.io/octocat/hello_docker:latest

Unlinking a repository from a package on GitHub

Note

Unlinking a package from a repository will remove the repository information from the package's landing page and can affect the access pattern depending on whether the package inherits its access permissions from the repository. For more information, see Configuring a package's access control and visibility. This behavior does not apply to Apache Maven packages, as outlined in About permissions for GitHub Packages.

  1. On GitHub, navigate to the settings page of the Package you'd like to unlink.

  2. On the Package settings page, you will see a Repository source section. If this section is not present, then the Package is not currently linked to a repository.

  3. Click on the trash icon in the top right corner of the Repository source section.

It is possible that the Repository source section exists, but there is no trash icon present. This is because a repository source has been defined as part of the packaged code i.e. a package.json file, .gemspec file, however, it is not actually linked to a repository on GitHub. To link the package to a repository, you will need to follow the steps in the section above.

  1. Confirm that you would like to unlink the repository from the package with the dialogue.

Migrating a package to another repository

If you currently have a package linked to a repository and you would like to link it to a different repository, this can be done by unlinking the package from the current repository and linking it to the new repository.

  1. Follow the steps to unlink it, see Unlinking a repository from a package on GitHub.
  2. Follow the steps to link the package to the new repository, see Connecting a repository to an organization-scoped package on GitHub or Connecting a repository to a user-scoped package on GitHub.