How to set the receive.denyNonFastForwards on a repository in GitHub

Question

I have a repository hosted on GitHub which has several forks.

How can I set up the config of the main repository to set the receive.denyNonFastForwards

Answer 1

Github enterprise edition now has a feature for disabling force pushes. For the ones not using the enterprise edition you can configure a pre-push hook.

It is a good practice to never force-push to master unless absolutely necessary.

Answer 2

GitHub does not expose this functionality, though there are two options:

• GitHub support can set this on a repository.

• You can emulate this by setting the GitHub repository as a mirror of another repository that you have more control over. Only give write access to the GitHub account to a minimal set of responsible individuals, and to an account used to do the mirroring. The non-GitHub repository would be where you would set receive.denyNonFastForwards, and have everyone push. The mirroring could then be done by a post-receive hook, cron job, or a combination of the two. A reason to go with both would be to get a minimal time lag between the two repositories, and still make sure everything is up to date even if the post-receive hook failed to update GitHub (if GitHub was down, for example).