Using enterprise-managed settings without organizations

Special guidance for enterprises that are only used to assign Copilot Business licenses.

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Enterprise owners

En este artículo

You may have created an enterprise account with no organizations to distribute Copilot without paying for GitHub Enterprise. This is sometimes called Copilot Standalone. With this setup, you can still use enterprise managed settings, but you should be aware of some additional guidance.

If you're using a standard enterprise setup with organizations, you can ignore this guidance.

Using server-managed settings

Server-managed settings require an organization and a .github-private repository. To create these, one user in your enterprise needs a GitHub Enterprise license. If you use volume or subscription billing, contact your account team to purchase a license. Otherwise, the license will automatically be assigned when the user joins an organization.

The user with the license can:

  1. Create an organization and join it as an owner.
  2. Add a .github-private repository, make the repository the enterprise's source of managed settings, and add settings to the managed-settings.json file. For step-by-step instructions, see Getting started with enterprise-managed settings.

From that point on, any user on your enterprise's Copilot plan is governed by those settings, regardless of whether they have access to the .github-private repository.

The main limitation of this method is the GitHub Enterprise license required to create the organization and repository.

Using MDM-managed or file-based settings

If you don't want to add a GitHub Enterprise license or create an organization, you can deploy the same logical settings through MDM (such as Intune or Jamf) or a file-based deployment. File-based delivery uses the JSON schema directly. Native MDM delivery uses flat keys and string-encoded values. Neither method requires an organization or .github-private repository.

For more information about deployment methods, see Choosing how to deploy enterprise-managed settings to users.

Plugin access considerations

If managed settings define a plugin using enabledPlugins, the client automatically tries to install it for each user. The user needs access to where the plugin files are hosted. If the plugin is hosted in a private repository on GitHub, the user needs access to that repository, which may require a license.