Easier organization and increased scalability for repository administrators

Admins managing repositories have a range of responsibilities including triaging issues, reviewing pull requests and, of course, developing code. One of the main duties is managing repository access for organization members, outside collaborators, and teams. To make this easier for you, we’ve redesigned our access page to allow administrators to better understand who has access to their repo, their level of access, and improve the management of access to their repository.

Easier organization

In the previous design, the lack of search or filtering made it challenging for admins to find individuals or teams for repositories with a large number of members. To make it easier we’ve added a search bar and consolidated the Teams and Collaborators sections into a single, combined view that allows admins to filter based on their member type. You can filter by organization members, outside collaborators, teams, and pending invitations.

Permission management

A challenge admins faced in the previous design was determining how a particular repository member inherited permissions. Repository members are given permission levels by being part of a team, nested team, or through direct assignment of a role. For example, a read role can be directly applied to a collaborator on a repository, however, they could be granted a higher permission level by being part of a team with write access.  To make it clear for admins how users are directly and indirectly gaining permissions to a repository, we’ve introduced a mixed roles warning, which displays the highest level role the user is granted if their permission level is higher than their assigned role.

Increased scalability

Page accessibility was also an issue for some admins. The lack of pagination caused teams and collaborator entries to appear on a single page causing recurrent timeouts for repositories with large amounts of collaborators. Using the new design, repository admins are now able to manage access more performantly as the redesign now has about 45 percent fewer timeouts.

Using the latest updates

When you log in to a repository where you have admin privileges, you can see the latest changes. Navigate to Settings and click Manage access in the left side bar to access and manage the recent updates. We can’t wait to learn how these changes help you get through tasks more efficiently in your workflow.

Learn more about managing access to your repository

Written by

Jarryd McCree

@jamccree

Staff Product Manager, GitHub