GitHub’s Post

Transcript

I'm sorry. I'm going to be up all night deleting license keys from the repo. Oh, there's got to be a better way... And there is, because at GitHub we believe in the power of collaboration. But we also believe in safety as a repository maintainer. I need to be able to prevent certain types of risky file changes. Push rules are a new type of ruleset which gives administrators like me fine-grained control over which files and paths can be modified or added to the repo. File path restrictions allow us to block changes to specific directories and file name patterns, for example. Maybe I don't want anyone messing with the automation in this repo, so I'll protect the whole workflows directory. Now, aside from being awkward, long file paths can cause problems on certain operating systems, so I might choose to limit them to a specific number of characters. There are also a bunch of file types I don't want in my repo. Lately I've had a problem with developers accidentally storing license keys in the repo instead of in a separate key store. So I'll add ���key��� as a disallowed extension. And if you've ever had someone push a huge dataset or binary image, you know how quickly that can blow up your repo. Those files belong elsewhere. So I'm going to set a maximum size for each file committed. Of course, there may be certain individuals or teams I regularly trust to bypass these rules. If so, I can simply add them to the bypass list for this repo. For those not on the bypass list, their pushes will be blocked if they don't meet the rules I've put in place, and they'll be able to see why their push was blocked. But they can also ask for a one-time exception to the rule, giving me the option to approve or deny the request. So now I can rest easy knowing my private and internal repositories and their forks are protected. Find out more at gh.io/push-rules