Migrating from individual accounts to an Organizational account

[CPFCFan]

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Hi Community!

Thank you for your time and help!

We have a dozen or so individual accounts that we'd like to migrate to an Organizational account.
We have read:
https://github.com/move_work/new
And it seems too easy ;) ...
We're concerned we are missing tasks in developing our migration plan.
So far we see we need to migrate:

• Repositories
• Projects
• Packages

But what about things like user permissions or Admin user types?

Any ideas or tips in migrating are greatly appreciated!

Thanks!
Best Regards,
Donald

[Thiago-code-lab]

Hi @CPFCFan! 👋 Welcome to the Community!

You are completely right to be cautious—clicking the "Move work" button does seem a little too easy. While GitHub does handle the heavy lifting of moving the code and git history, migrating a dozen individual accounts into a single Organization requires a bit of strategic planning, especially around access control and the "order of operations."

Here is a breakdown of what you need to consider for user permissions, plus a few hidden tasks to add to your migration plan!

1. Planning User Permissions & Admin Types
   When you move to an Organization, you transition from "everyone owns their own stuff" to a centralized permission model.

You need to map out two levels of permissions:

Organization Roles: This dictates what people can do at the account level. Keep this tight. Most of your dozen users should be Members. Only give the Owner role to a very small group (like you and another IT/Engineering lead) who need to manage billing, global settings, and team creation.

Repository Roles (via Teams): Do not assign users directly to repositories. Create Teams (e.g., backend-devs, frontend-devs) and assign the teams to the repositories. You can assign different roles to these teams, such as Admin (can delete the repo/change settings), Write (can push code), or Read (can clone/pull).

2. The "Gotchas" (What to add to your Migration Plan)
   Crucial Order of Operations:
   You must invite all the individual users to join the new Organization before you transfer their repositories. When you transfer a repository from a personal account to an organization, issues assigned to members in the organization remain intact, but all other issue assignees are cleared. Adding them to the Organization first preserves their issue assignments!

Default Permissions & Collaborators:
Once a repository is transferred to an organization, the organization's default repository permission settings and default membership privileges will apply to the transferred repository. Also, keep in mind that the original owner of the repository is automatically added as a collaborator on the transferred repository.

Local Developer Environments:
While GitHub sets up web redirects for your old repository URLs, your developers should eventually update their local Git remotes to point to the new Organization URL to prevent any future friction. They will need to run:
git remote set-url origin https://github.com/YourNewOrg/RepoName.git

Secrets & GitHub Actions:
If the individual accounts were heavily using GitHub Actions, their repository-level secrets will transfer. However, migrating to an Organization is the perfect time to audit these. You can now use Organization-level secrets to share API keys across multiple repositories, rather than duplicating them in every single repo.

GitHub Pages:
If any of these personal accounts were hosting documentation or sites via GitHub Pages, their URLs will change from username.github.io/repo to OrganizationName.github.io/repo. You'll need to update any hardcoded links or documentation.