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One thing I noticed: Using the GitHub UI, I added a collaborator to a repository. I saw that they committed changes without any authority / approval from me. It was a private repository.

With private repositories, how do I give someone read access versus write access?

Peter Mortensen
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Brettski
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2 Answers2

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With private repositories, how do I give someone read access versus write access?

This kind of permission is not available for simple accounts. When you add an user as a collaborator, he gains read/write permissions.

The story changes if you own an Organization. Organizations contains teams and each team can have different level of access, including read-only. You can assign users to a specific read-only group, and they will only have pull access to the repositories.

Peter Mortensen
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Simone Carletti
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  • @Simone: Does it also mean that the collaborators can "accept" their own pull requests on behalf of the repo owner? http://stackoverflow.com/q/8502540/583539 – moey Dec 14 '11 at 14:23
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Private repositories in an ordinary user account are an all-or-nothing deal: either someone has full read/write access (i.e., they're a collaborator) or they have no access. However, if you set up an organization, create the repo under the aegis of the organization, and then add the collaborator, you have much more fine-grained control (including giving read-only access to a private repo).

mipadi
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