Adding and removing individual contributors to your repos can become inconvenient, especially when new team members join and old members leave.
You can solve this problem by creating a team and adding the entire team to the repository. When someone joins the team, she will automatically gain permission for the repo. When she leaves, he will be automatically removed.
You can view existing teams on our St. Thomas teams page:
Team Creation
You can also create your own teams -- as many as you want.
Just visit the Teams page and click the green "New team" button in the top right corner.
You are free to set the visibility of a new team to "Secret" or "Visible." A Visible team is visible to the entire university. A Secret team is visible only to its members and to system administrators.
Automating Team Membership with Identity Provider Groups
When you create a team, you can tie it to one or more St. Thomas Active Directory Groups (such as "Biology Faculty and Staff DG" or "Group: Aquinas Scholars"). If you do, the team will be synchronized to that Active Directory Group. Anyone who has joined the A.D. group is added to the GitHub team; anyone who is no longer in the A.D. group is removed.
We recommend this approach. It makes team management much easier.
Synchronization with Active Directory happens hourly. When you update A.D. memberships, it may take up to an hour for those changes to be reflected in GitHub.
NOTE: Teams linked to an Identity Provider Group cannot have child teams.
Finding the Right A.D. Groups for Your GitHub Team
The Identity Provider Groups provided to GitHub come straight from St. Thomas's Active Directory, and must be added by name.
You can search for applicable A.D. groups in Outlook People Online. For example, if you're creating a GitHub team for the Law Admissions team, you might go here and search "Law" to find an applicable A.D. group:
Then you can add the appropriate group to the team in GitHub:
Tip: The lookup menu is not a freeform search; you must type in the group name exactly, starting from the beginning. For example, if the group you are looking for is called "Group: UST Chemistry Department Stockroom," you must type in "Group: UST Chem" to find it. Typing in just "Chemistry" will not find it.
Synchronization will begin immediately and take about an hour.
Anyone in the A.D. group who has not yet linked their St. Thomas account to their GitHub account will not be added to the GitHub team yet, but will automatically be added once they join GitHub and link their St. Thomas account (allow several hours for that synchronization to finish.)
St. Thomas already has many hundreds of managed groups, many of them automated. You may also create your own group and manage its membership manually in Outlook Groups, although this means manually managing it yourself.
Need help?
More information about the St. Thomas GitHub environment (including guides, labs, website management, team management, repo creation, and more) can be found in GitHub Campus: Read Me First.
ITS is available to provide any assistance that you may need with the St. Thomas GitHub. Email techdesk@stthomas.edu to open a support ticket (cc jjheaney@stthomas.edu).