Why you should create a GitHub Organization for your side project

It’s free.

But for real though, there’s many amazing benefits that a GitHub organization can provide. And if you’re planning on your project being open source in a public repository then you can get all the great benefits completely free!

GitHub also provides some paid options that mainly allow for additional features to be used in private repositories. Details can be found here: https://github.com/organizations/plan.

Let’s get into some of the benefits of using a GitHub organization and how your side project may be a good candidate for one.

I actively use a GitHub organization for my own project and am able to manage many different repositories under a single organization where they can share resources. This is the best part of an GitHub Organization (getting tired of typing that so gonna call it GHO from here on). Sharing resources between projects is a huge boon for productivity. My favorite ones to share are Projects and Secrets.

GitHub Projects allow you to create a Kanban style board to manage issues and pull requests. Under a GHO, you are able to create an organization wide Project and prioritize/watch the progress of issues from many different repositories that are involved in the project.

Next is Secrets, secrets are a great way to provide API keys and other sensitive information to a GitHub Action. While under a GHO, you can easily create secrets at the organization level that can then be shared with selected, all private repos, or all private and public repos. I personally deploy code to Firebase and publish NPM packages so I’m able to easily share my access token to any repos that need it for CI/CD.

There are many other great benefits of using a GHO, but these have been my favorite features thus far. Additionally, if your current side project is owned by your personal GitHub account, it is extremely easy to create a new organization and transfer ownership of the repository. (Look out for an upcoming article on how to do this)

The one caveat to this advice, however, is that an organization is certainly overkill if you are developing a small side project that can be easily contained in one repository. But if you start making use of multiple repos or see an opportunity to split up your codebase into multiple repos then a GitHub Organization is the one of the best ways to keep your code organized.