Building Tools with GitHub

Appendix A. GitHub Enterprise

Most people understandably equate GitHub (the company) with GitHub.com (the website), but it’s interesting to note that they’re not one and the same.

The GitHub website, as important as it is to modern open and closed source software development, is not the only product that GitHub (the company) produces. The single largest other product from that team is called GitHub Enterprise, and it’s a version of the GitHub software that can be deployed inside a corporate firewall—like having your own private GitHub.com.

The two products are very similar from a user’s point of view, but there are some important differences. It can sometimes be hard to imagine the kinds of difficulties that Enterprise is designed to solve, but keep in mind that it’s for large teams.

Installation

Using GitHub Enterprise isn’t as easy as signing up for an account. You’re responsible for all the infrastructure and maintenance, including installation, updates, system maintenance, keeping the machine running, and so on. However, if your company is considering Enterprise, it’s likely you already have specialists who are already doing this for other services.

The GitHub team has also made it pretty easy for them. The software comes as a pre-packaged virtual machine in a variety of formats, so you’ll likely find something that fits into your infrastructure. Once the machine is running, most of the configuration can be done with a web interface, but there are some ...