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Verifying or approving a domain for your organization

You can verify your ownership of domains with GitHub to confirm your organization's identity. You can also approve domains that GitHub can send email notifications to for members of your organization.

Organization owners can verify or approve a domain for an organization.

About domain verification

After verifying ownership of your organization's domains, a "Verified" badge will display on the organization's profile. If your organization has agreed to the Corporate Terms of Service, organization owners will be able to verify the identity of organization members by viewing each member's email address within the verified domain. For more information, see "About your organization's profile page" and "Upgrading to the Corporate Terms of Service."

If your organization is owned by an enterprise account, a "Verified" badge will display on your organization's profile for any domains verified for the enterprise account, in addition to any domains verified for the organization. Organization owners can view any domains that an enterprise owner has verified or approved, and edit the domains if the organization owner is also an enterprise owner. For more information, see "Verifying or approving a domain for your enterprise."

Note: To verify or approve domains, your organization must use GitHub Enterprise Cloud. For more information about how you can try GitHub Enterprise Cloud for free, see "Setting up a trial of GitHub Enterprise Cloud."

To display a "Verified" badge, the website and email information shown on an organization's profile must match the verified domain or domains. If the website and email address shown on your organization's profile are hosted on different domains, you must verify both domains. If the website and email address use variants of the same domain, you must verify both variants. For example, if the profile shows the website www.example.com and the email address info@example.com, you would need to verify both www.example.com and example.com.

After verifying ownership of your organization's domain, you can restrict email notifications for the organization to that domain. For more information, see "Restricting email notifications for your organization."

You can also verify custom domains used for GitHub Pages to prevent domain takeovers when a custom domain remains configured but your GitHub Pages site is either disabled or no longer uses the domain. For more information, see "Verifying your custom domain for GitHub Pages."

About domain approval

Note: Domain approval is currently in beta and subject to change.

If you want to allow members to receive email notifications at a domain you don't own, you can approve the domain, then allow GitHub to send email notifications to addresses within the domain. For example, you can allow a contractor who doesn't have an email address within your own domain to receive email notifications at a domain you feel comfortable with.

After you approve domains for your organization, you can restrict email notifications for activity within the organization to users with verified email addresses within verified or approved domains. For more information, see "Restricting email notifications for your organization."

Enterprise owners cannot see which organization members or email addresses receive notifications within approved domains.

Enterprise owners can also approve additional domains for organizations owned by the enterprise. For more information, see "Verifying or approving a domain for your enterprise."

Verifying a domain for your organization

To verify a domain, you must have access to modify domain records with your domain hosting service.

  1. In the top right corner of GitHub.com, click your profile photo, then click Your organizations. Your organizations in the profile menu

  2. Next to the organization, click Settings. The settings button

  3. In the "Security" section of the sidebar, click Verified and approved domains.

  4. Click Add a domain. Add a domain button

  5. In the domain field, type the domain you'd like to verify, then click Add domain. Add a domain field

  6. Follow the instructions under Add a DNS TXT record to create a DNS TXT record with your domain hosting service. Instructions to create a DNS txt record

  7. Wait for your DNS configuration to change, which may take up to 72 hours. You can confirm your DNS configuration has changed by running the dig command on the command line, replacing ORGANIZATION with the name of your organization and example.com with the domain you'd like to verify. You should see your new TXT record listed in the command output.

    $ dig _github-challenge-ORGANIZATION.example.com +nostats +nocomments +nocmd TXT
  8. After confirming your TXT record is added to your DNS, follow steps one through three above to navigate to your organization's approved and verified domains.

  9. To the right of the domain that's pending verification, click , then click Continue verifying. Continue verifying domain button

  10. Click Verify. Verify button

  11. Optionally, once the "Verified" badge is visible on your organization's profile page, you can delete the TXT entry from the DNS record at your domain hosting service. Verified badge

Approving a domain for your organization

Note: Domain approval is currently in beta and subject to change.

  1. In the top right corner of GitHub.com, click your profile photo, then click Your organizations. Your organizations in the profile menu

  2. Next to the organization, click Settings. The settings button

  3. In the "Security" section of the sidebar, click Verified and approved domains.

  4. Click Add a domain. Add a domain button

  5. In the domain field, type the domain you'd like to verify, then click Add domain. Add a domain field

  6. To the right of "Can't verify this domain?", click Approve it instead. "Approve it instead" text when verifying a domain

  7. Read the information about domain approval, then click Approve DOMAIN. "Approve DOMAIN" button in confirmation dialog

Removing an approved or verified domain

  1. In the top right corner of GitHub.com, click your profile photo, then click Your organizations. Your organizations in the profile menu

  2. Next to the organization, click Settings. The settings button

  3. In the "Security" section of the sidebar, click Verified and approved domains.

  4. To the right of the domain to remove, click , then click Delete. "Delete" for a domain