Github: readonly access to a private repo

Question

I am developing some private projects on Github, and I would like to add nightly cronjobs to my deployments servers to pull the latest version from github. I am currently do

Answer 1

I have it on good authority that the (relatively new) "Organizations" feature allows you to add people with read-only access to a private repository.

Answer 2

For anyone else finding this question, know that nowadays you can in fact create read-only deploy keys:

https://github.com/blog/2024-read-only-deploy-keys

You can still create deploy keys with write access, but have to explicitly grant that permission when adding the key.

Answer 3

For Organizations: I suggest creating a new team specifically for the user. This team can then grant read-only access to the repositories you specify. I hope this helps!

Answer 4

I know that the questions is about github but maybe for some readers it would be nice to know that this is possible in gitlab and for free. Check https://gitlab.com/help/user/permissions. I spend some time using github without fully serving my purposes. If I knew then I would have started this particular project with gitlab.