Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by xn 125 days ago
Are there any good reasons to use multiple GitHub user accounts? GitHub organization membership and permissions are well designed in my experience, negating the need for multiple user accounts.
5 comments

Consultants or professional services folks will be working in their company’s GitHub account and several clients. Requires managing lots of git/GitHub accounts
Simplifying for brevity* -- there are three levels in the GitHub entity:

  - accounts (personal)
  - orgs (companies, directories, teams, roles etc.)
  - enterprises (sets of orgs)
Even with enterprise SSO, the initial connect to GH can (is typically) "you" (just as you have the same driver license to show at the front desk when registering to visit a secured firm or random hotel), then you elevate "you" into the org through SSO, and what policies apply to you via your org can be 'governed' at the enterprise.

The idea behind this model is that no, you don't have to manage lots of those as you, you're just you, and each of those you aim to use has an elevation that entity controls instead of you controlling it.

This ultimately results in way less key material floating around, and you losing, leaking, or lousing up your own GH cred doesn't auto-give an attacker the SSO elevation.

• • •

Not incidentally, I have a slew of "accounts" given to me by companies that don't bother to make an org, they just invite individuals to repos or make individual accounts for their repo. I suppose it's cheaper in the short run. In the long run, these accounts are 90% still left active years to (no kidding) decade+ later. Seems a better idea to "don't do this." If you're a company, be an org.

---

* Expanded for more depth: https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/learning-about-github...

> Are there any good reasons to use multiple GitHub user accounts?

Is there any good reasons not to separate what you work on into multiple GitHub accounts? Not to mention some people don't want all their projects attached to one profile, some people also develop in their free-time, and don't want to mix freetime/work projects under the same user account, for multiple reasons.

I use a pseudonym during my free time, so yes. Also my employer is requiring us to use company-specific GitHub accounts, so the decision is out of my hands anyway.
We went with that primarily due to requiring SSO and because we might want employees to interact with other projects with the company hat on.

If they used their personal account for both, it could be unclear if they speak on behalf of our company or not.

A why not

B if you ever be in a company using the half baked GitHub hosted enterprise….