people-repo.md

The people repository

In order for gu:who to run against a GitHub organisation, the organisation must have a repository named people. As an example, here's the people repo in the gu-who-demo-org:

https://github.com/gu-who-demo-org/people

Effectively, this repository will act as the datastore for gu:who:

• It contains the users.txt file, listing all the valid members of the organisation by username, as manually added by senior staff.
• The GitHub Issues for that project are created by gu:who itself - it's where gu:who reports the list of problem users it's found.

Setting up the people repository

Creating the people repository is something you need to do manually- gu:who won't do it for you, and the reason for that is that ideally it should be a private GitHub repository, given that it will contain sensitive information. However, the format of the repository is pretty simple, so it's not hard to setup:

1. Create a new (private) repo (https://github.com/new) - you may as well use GitHub's option to initialize this repository with a README.
2. Create a file called users.txt at the top-level of the repo's file hierarchy, just like this one: https://github.com/gu-who-demo-org/people/blob/master/users.txt

That's enough to get gu:who running. Note that gu:who will raise issues against users in your organisation who don't have an entry in the users.txt file - they should get their line-manager, or even just a more-senior colleague, to create a pull-request to add their GitHub username to this file. This is better than just adding usernames in bulk (ie without vetting them first), because the person who adds that username to that file is responsible for that person being in the organisation- and we can see who that is just by using git blame