Request: Make private pages available to Teams plan

[mschoettle]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Product Feedback

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Pages

Body

I was quite surprised to realize that an Enterprise plan is required for private pages. Please make this feature available to organizations on the Teams plan. It is difficult to justify the increased price for Enterprise to get this.

If it helps to motivate this further: GitLab offers this even for the free tier ;)

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[mohammadrezwankhan]

Your pricing observation matches the current documentation: GitHub Pages is available from public repositories on Free, and from public or private repositories on Pro, Team, and Enterprise. The important distinction is the access-control feature: private publication requires GitHub Enterprise Cloud. A Team organization can therefore keep the source repository private, but it cannot make the Pages site itself private through GitHub’s native access control.

That makes this an entitlement gap rather than a repository-visibility or deployment bug. The practical choices today are:

• If the site may be public, use Team Pages and keep secrets/private data out of the generated output.
• If the docs must be private, keep the source private and deploy the built artifact through an authentication-capable host or reverse proxy. Have Actions publish only the build output using short-lived credentials; do not expose the repository or use Pages as a substitute for authorization.
• If the audience is an enterprise, Enterprise Cloud’s private project-site mode is the native option. Its documented model gates access through repository read access and gives privately published sites a separate *.pages.github.io subdomain.

For the requested Teams feature, I would make it a private project site (not an organization site) with an explicit access mode: repository readers, selected organization teams, or enterprise members. The MVP should include a plan/visibility matrix before enabling Pages, a private subdomain with no public indexing, deployment and access audit events, custom-domain verification rules, and an obvious “site is private” marker. A repository-read permission check at request time would also avoid stale access after a member or team is removed.

References: What is GitHub Pages? and Changing the visibility of your GitHub Pages site.