Setting Up Copilot for Your Organization

Rolling out GitHub Copilot across your organization requires more than just purchasing seats. This lesson walks you through the complete setup process — from configuring your GitHub org to assigning seats, integrating SSO, and establishing policies that govern how Copilot operates across your teams.

Prerequisites and Planning

Before you begin the technical setup, ensure you have the following in place. Proper planning at this stage prevents headaches later and ensures a smooth rollout for your entire engineering team.

• GitHub Organization: You need an active GitHub organization (not a personal account). If your company uses GitHub Enterprise Cloud, you already have one.
• Organization Owner access: Only org owners can enable Copilot and manage policies. Ensure you have the correct permissions.
• Budget approval: Copilot Business is $19/user/month and Enterprise is $39/user/month. Have your budget approved for the number of seats you plan to assign.
• Identity provider details: If you plan to use SSO/SAML, have your IdP configuration details ready (Azure AD, Okta, OneLogin, etc.).
• Stakeholder alignment: Ensure your security team, legal team, and engineering leadership are aligned on AI code generation policies.

Step-by-Step Organization Setup

Follow these steps to enable Copilot for your GitHub organization. Each step includes the exact navigation path and configuration options.

Seat Management and Assignment

Effective seat management ensures that every developer who needs Copilot has access, while keeping costs under control. GitHub provides several strategies for managing seat assignments at scale.

Seats that go unused for 30 days are flagged in the admin dashboard, allowing you to reclaim them and reassign to developers who will benefit more. GitHub also provides CSV export of seat assignment data for reporting and auditing purposes.

SSO and SAML Integration

For organizations using single sign-on, Copilot integrates seamlessly with your existing identity provider. When SSO is configured, Copilot seat access is governed by your IdP — when a user is deprovisioned from your IdP, their Copilot access is automatically revoked.

GitHub supports SAML SSO with the following identity providers:

• Azure Active Directory (Entra ID) — The most common enterprise choice, with full SCIM provisioning support
• Okta — Supports automated user provisioning and group-based seat assignment
• OneLogin — Full SAML 2.0 support with directory sync
• PingFederate — Enterprise IdP with advanced attribute mapping
• Custom SAML 2.0 — Any SAML 2.0 compliant identity provider

Configuring Organization-Wide Policies

Organization policies give you fine-grained control over how Copilot behaves for all members. These settings are configured at the org level and apply to everyone, though Enterprise plans allow per-team overrides for some settings.

# GitHub Copilot Organization Policy
# Configured via: Settings > Copilot > Policies

copilot_policies:
  # Code suggestion settings
  suggestions:
    # Allow suggestions matching public code?
    # Options: allow, block, allow_with_references
    public_code_suggestions: allow_with_references

    # Which languages should Copilot provide suggestions for?
    # Use '*' for all, or specify a list
    enabled_languages:
      - python
      - javascript
      - typescript
      - go
      - java
      - rust
      - "*"  # or allow all

  # Copilot Chat settings
  chat:
    enabled: true
    # Allow chat in IDE (VS Code, JetBrains, etc.)
    ide_chat: true
    # Allow chat on GitHub.com
    web_chat: true
    # Allow Copilot to reference Bing search results
    bing_search: true

  # Content exclusions - files/paths Copilot will never read
  content_exclusions:
    - "**/.env"
    - "**/.env.*"
    - "**/secrets/**"
    - "**/credentials/**"
    - "config/production.yml"
    - "internal/proprietary-algorithm/**"

  # Seat assignment policy
  seat_policy:
    # Options: all_members, selected_teams, request_workflow
    assignment: selected_teams
    teams:
      - engineering
      - data-science
      - devops
    # Auto-remove seats after N days of inactivity
    inactive_removal_days: 60

  # Data handling
  data:
    # Allow GitHub to use your code for model improvements?
    telemetry_for_training: false
    # Retain Copilot Chat conversation logs?
    retain_chat_logs: true
    chat_log_retention_days: 90

While this YAML format represents the policy structure conceptually, actual configuration is done through the GitHub web interface. Enterprise customers can also use the GitHub REST API to programmatically manage these settings, which is useful for organizations managing multiple GitHub organizations or automating policy deployment.

Verifying Your Setup

After completing the configuration, verify everything is working correctly before announcing the rollout to your team. Here is a quick checklist to run through: