GitHub.com is a third party site we use to publish open source projects. Your GitHub.com account is your personal property that you might have created before joining the company and will continue to use after you leave. It’s much like your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or any other social media account. Consult HR with any questions about your personal use of social media as it pertains to the company.

GitHub Accounts

In the case of open source, things are slightly more complicated since on the one hand, your GitHub account is yours, on the other hand, your participation in our open source projects (the ones we host and the ones we ask you to contribute to) are part of your employment. GitHub’s Terms of Service only allow you to have one free account, thus we do not want you to create a shadow disposable account for your work. Using a single account ensures your contributions are connected to you after you leave the company.

To participate in work-related open source projects:

  1. Use your personal GitHub.com account. Create one if you don’t have one.
  2. Add your powerhrg.com email address to your account. Please use this email address to make work-related commits. Why? because some projects track contributions by company and we’d like to celebrate the work you are doing. If you are reluctant to associate your work address with your personal account, please contact the SDRT to discuss a work-around.
  3. Activate two-factor authentication on your account. This is a good security practice in general, and is required for all users who are given access to the powerhome org. Make sure you save the recovery codes for your two-factor authentication, we will not be able to help you if you lose your security device and get locked out of your account.
  4. Add an SSH key to your account to make it easier to access GitHub.com from the command line.

In addition, we suggest you add additional profile information to your account:

  1. Your name makes it easier for us to identify you. Please use your full name as per Nitro.
  2. Our company (@powerhome) helps us promote our tech brand by showing who our open source contributors are.
  3. An avatar, either your real picture or something other than the default.

We recognize that some people prefer not to use their name, image, or other information in public websites. We are here to help you succeed with open source and will help work around your preferences to find something that makes sense.

A reminder: Do not post company code in your personal GitHub account without getting the code approved for publication first.

GitHub Organizations

Power open source projects are released on GitHub.com and are published in the powerhome organization. Do not publish any content to an organization you created without first consulting the SDRT. If you need to claim an organization name for a project we’re about to publish, feel free to do so, but consult with the SDRT before publishing anything to it.

It may be appropriate to publish code to your personal account. e.g. your code (not related to work).

  1. Purely personal projects that have nothing to do with your job. (We’ll help you determine if this is the case.)
  2. Sample code for a talk at an event not related to Power.
  3. Unofficial, experimental, or sample code.

Any code referenced from our documentation or blog post belongs in the powerhome organization. If you’re unsure whether a project should be published there or under your personal account, ask us.

GitHub App Policy

Developer teams benefit from using certain GitHub Apps to improve their workflow and code quality. Certain apps, like Travis CI, are already installed in our GitHub organization because they are widely used and require very basic permissions that don’t pose much risk. However, some apps require certain permissions that create potential security risks. For this reason, we make sure apps don’t request more permissions than we’re willing to accept. If you have questions about the security concerns of granting certain permissions to GitHub Apps, contact the SDRT.

How to Install a new GitHub App

  1. Have the developer team go through the normal sign up process for the GitHub App. This will generate an email to the organization owners that someone is requesting to install an app.
  2. This email will include a link to review the permissions the app is requesting. Contact the SDRT if you have questions about certain permissions that apps request.

The following lists provide examples of permissions that pose varying levels of risk.

  1. Apps that request read-access to public information in repositories for code, issues, pull requests, commit status, etc. are accepted by default.
  2. We consider apps that request read-access to non-public information on public repositories, such as webhooks and membership metadata, or that request write-access to comments, pull requests, and issues to be low-risk and usually acceptable.
  3. Apps that request: Write-access to code repositories, Read/write access to private repositories, and Write access to non-public information like webhooks, membership, and emails to be moderate-risk and need to be reviewed by the SDRT.
  4. Apps that request: Admin control over repositories, Owner control over organization, or Read/write access to GPG keys are high-risk and need to be reviewed by the SDRT and will probably be rejected.

GitHub Repos

Request a Repo. Request a new repository by contacting the SDRT (or opening a ticket on our queue). We stage code in a private repo, and expect these are going to be made public once approved. If you need a private repo for a long term project, please reach out to the SDRT to discuss. Note: GitHub Pages are always visible to the public, even if the repo is private. If you’re staging code for release, run Jekyll to preview them locally.

Archive a Repo. Open source projects don’t remain active forever. We archive repositories when they are no longer being worked on. The archive feature makes the repository read-only and prevents changes to the code, Issues, PR’s, the wiki, and more. In those cases, we ask maintainers to add a line at the top of the README to indicate that the project is no longer being maintained. Please ask the SDRT for help if you’d like us to archive a project.

Copyright Power Home Remodeling Group LLC. Copyright Verizon Media. Content licensed under CC-BY-4.0