Skip to main content
All products
Code security

This version of GitHub Enterprise was discontinued on 2023-03-15. No patch releases will be made, even for critical security issues. For better performance, improved security, and new features, upgrade to the latest version of GitHub Enterprise. For help with the upgrade, contact GitHub Enterprise support.

Securing your organization

In this article

You can use a number of GitHub features to help keep your organization secure.

Who can use this feature

Organization owners can configure organization security settings.

Introduction

This guide shows you how to configure security features for an organization. Your organization's security needs are unique and you may not need to enable every security feature. For more information, see "GitHub security features."

Some features are available for all repositories. Additional features are available to enterprises that use GitHub Advanced Security. For more information, see "About GitHub Advanced Security."

Managing access to your organization

You can use roles to control what actions people can take in your organization. For example, you can assign the security manager role to a team to give them the ability to manage security settings across your organization, as well as read access to all repositories. For more information, see "Roles in an organization."

Creating a default security policy

You can create a default security policy that will display in any of your organization's public repositories that do not have their own security policy. For more information, see "Creating a default community health file."

Managing Dependabot alerts and the dependency graph

Enterprise owners can configure the dependency graph and Dependabot alerts for an enterprise. For more information, see "Enabling the dependency graph for your enterprise" and "Enabling Dependabot for your enterprise."

For more information, see "About Dependabot alerts," "Exploring the dependencies of a repository," and "Managing security and analysis settings for your organization."

Managing dependency review

Dependency review is an Advanced Security feature that lets you visualize dependency changes in pull requests before they are merged into your repositories. For more information, see "About dependency review."

Dependency review is available when dependency graph is enabled for your GitHub Enterprise Server instance and you enable Advanced Security for the organization (see below).

Managing Dependabot security updates

For any repository that uses Dependabot alerts, you can enable Dependabot security updates to raise pull requests with security updates when vulnerabilities are detected. You can also enable or disable Dependabot security updates for all repositories across your organization.

  1. Click your profile photo, then click Organizations.
  2. Click Settings next to your organization.
  3. Click Security & analysis.
  4. Click Enable all or Disable all next to Dependabot security updates.
  5. Optionally, select Automatically enable for new repositories.

For more information, see "About Dependabot security updates" and "Managing security and analysis settings for your organization."

Managing Dependabot version updates

You can enable Dependabot to automatically raise pull requests to keep your dependencies up-to-date. For more information, see "About Dependabot version updates."

To enable Dependabot version updates, you must create a dependabot.yml configuration file. For more information, see "Configuring Dependabot version updates."

Managing GitHub Advanced Security

If your enterprise has an Advanced Security license, you can enable or disable Advanced Security features.

  1. Click your profile photo, then click Organizations.
  2. Click Settings next to your organization.
  3. Click Security & analysis.
  4. Click Enable all or Disable all next to GitHub Advanced Security.
  5. Optionally, select Automatically enable for new private repositories.

For more information, see "About GitHub Advanced Security" and "Managing security and analysis settings for your organization."

Configuring secret scanning

Secret scanning is available if your enterprise uses Advanced Security.

You can enable or disable secret scanning for all repositories across your organization that have GitHub Advanced Security enabled.

  1. Click your profile photo, then click Organizations.
  2. Click Settings next to your organization.
  3. Click Code security & analysis.
  4. Click Enable all or Disable all next to Secret scanning.
  5. In the dialog box displayed, optionally select Automatically enable for repositories added to Advanced Security.
  6. Click the enable or disable button in the dialog box to confirm the change.

For more information, see "Managing security and analysis settings for your organization."

Configuring code scanning

Code scanning is available if your enterprise uses Advanced Security.

Code scanning is configured at the repository level. For more information, see "Configuring code scanning for a repository."

Next steps

You can view and manage alerts from security features to address dependencies and vulnerabilities in your code. For more information, see "Viewing and updating Dependabot alerts," "Managing pull requests for dependency updates," "Managing code scanning alerts for your repository," and "Managing alerts from secret scanning."

You can also monitor responses to security alerts within your organization. For more information, see "Auditing security alerts".

You can view, filter, and sort security alerts for repositories owned by your organization in security overview. For more information, see "About security overview."