GitHub Campus Program makes GitHub Enterprise features available to the Penn Community.
You must have a GitHub account before you can become a member of the University of Pennsylvania (upenn) organization on GitHub. You can use an existing account or create a new GitHub account here:
You can use any available name for your GitHub account. If your PennKey username (PennName) is unavailable, consider using yourpennname-upenn (i.e. bfrankln-upenn). Since GitHub account names are not unique to the upenn organization, do not assume that a GitHub account belongs to a Penn affiliate because it is the same as someone’s PennName.
All members of the upenn GitHub organization are required to have two-factor authentication enabled on their GitHub accounts. If you have not done so already, see these instructions (be sure to save your recovery codes when prompted):
After logging into your GitHub account (with two-factor authentication enabled), visit this URL to authenticate with your PennKey and automatically become a member of the upenn GitHub organization:
Note that you can associate your Penn WebLogin SSO identity with any of your GitHub accounts, but only one can be associated at a time. You will also be required to enable Two-factor authentication on your GitHub account, if you haven't done so already.
WARNING: GitHub is not suitable for storing sensitive information, including:
- Data subject to FERPA rules
- HIPAA protected information
- Unencrypted secrets such as passwords or private keys
Benefits:
- Protected by Penn WebLogin SSO
- GitHub Teams for cascading access permissions
- Standardized infrastructure available to University
- Security features enforced across all repositories in the enterprise
- Security Vulnerability Alerts for vulnerable repos
- Enterprise support for GitHub Classroom and integration with Canvas
- External collaboration with nonmembers is supported
- Continued access to code repostories is resilient to developer turnover
- GitHub Copilot coding assistant with multiple models (with Penn billing code; $19 / user / month)
Considerations:
- Not appropriate for storing sensitive data (see above)
- File Size Limits
- Repository Size Limits
- Migrating existing repositories into GitHub
GitHub Copilot is available for $19 per user per month at the Business level. At the business level, users are each given 300 premium request credits per month to use for queries; using the default model, currently GPT 4.1, is free.
As of this writing, the GitHub Campus Management Team has set up Copilot as follows:
- Data is excluded from training by default.
- Models available: Claude Sonnet 3.7, Google Gemini 2.0, and OpenAI o3
- Organizations choose whether to enable EDITOR PREVIEW FEATURES.
- User feedback collection is disabled across the Enterprise.
- Mobile and Copilot Extensions are disabled across the Enterprise, to ensure data remains excluded from any training by default.
- Copilot is enabled on GitHub.com, for features such as automated Copilot for Pull Requests, Copilot Chat in GitHub.com, and knowledge base search.
- Copilot is enabled on both the CLI and IDE.
- Copilot can search the web for additional context.
- Copilot Metrics API access is enabled for administrators at the organization and enterprise level.