Assignment Repo creation failure evidently due to enterprise policy restriction?

[sspickle]

Hi everyone,

I created a new assignment in a new Classroom tied to a new organization. The first (and only, so far) student to try to accept them assignment got this message:

"Your GitHub account cannot accept this invitation at this time. The Classroom's Organization restricts membership to users within the same Enterprise. Sign in with an account belonging to the same Enterprise or request that this account be added to your institution's Enterprise and try again. Contact your instructor or Enterprise administrators for further assistance."

I've run many GitHub classrooms from this enterprise account and never encountered this error before. I don't remember setting any such policy in this or any other organization. Maybe I've forgotten it somehow. Is anyone familiar with this error? Any thoughts on how to fix it? I don't want to add each student as a member of the enterprise! Thanks.

[nusrathdev]

check your organization and enterprise settings before inviting students, unexpected restrictions can block access, even if you didn’t set them yourself. always coordinate with your admins.

if you are admin look for a setting related to “Enterprise membership restrictions” or “Allowed members”.

[StewDent]

I'm an Admin, but on a very casual basis. Can you give more direction on where to find these settings and how to fix it?

[jonhubby]

I’ve also seen similar issues in the past where some hidden settings or policies can cause access problems, even when they aren't obviously configured. Double checking the "Enterprise membership restrictions" or "Allowed members" options in the organization’s settings should help. Also, if you have any institution-wide policies set up, it could be worth revisiting those just in case they’ve changed.

[sspickle]

I've looked through everything and I don't see any such restrictions. I've compared in detail to an org I used in the spring semester, and it appears to be identical. Here's the sequence of events:

Any idea how I can diagnose what's happening? I may also try in the global-campus discussion.

[duleepajt]

Did you find a solution. I have the same issue with my class.

[doctorscott]

Anybody? I'm having the same problem in all my classes. Something changed either in GitHub (Enterprise) or Classroom in the middle of the semester to cause this. The only solution I have is to manually add each student to the course organization. This is a real pain and defeats the purpose of using GH Classroom. Please help!

[sspickle]

I invited the students manually to the org. Not great, but at least I was able to run the class.

[sspickle]

This is still happening today. I was hoping it was just a temporary glitch. Are others still seeing this?

[dgmouris]

I'm getting this 500 when I accept an assignment.

I've been looking everywhere through the docs and I can't seem to find it.

@sspickle have you found anything PS. really appreociated for you to bring this up.

@RyanHecht this is a bit of a major alarm for us as we depend on this, sorry to add you to this but our semester starts really quickly here.

[yijizhang-nucs]

Sorry that I don't have an answer. Just writing to share my experience and my workaround (and a little rant).

Experience:

1. Everything worked fine at the beginning of April 2025 when I started our spring term.
2. I taught the same class (with the same Organization setting) in the summer term (June 2025), and my students started to get the 500 error. And if they click the assignment link again, they get the "Your GitHub account cannot accept this invitation at this time. ..." message.

Workaround:
Collect student github emails (regardless of whether they use the university email as their github account) and invite them to the organization. In the summer, I had very few students, so I manually did it. But I am about to write a script with GitHub CLI:
gh api orgs/<org name>/invitations -f email=<email>

Frustration:
I guess this gives better security guarantee...But I have so many more steps to do compared to before. I really hope they allow anyone to accept the assignment and just add them as outside collaborator. (I can see the security concern...but the amount of work added when I teach a large number of students is truly hard for me to appreciate the benefits...sigh.)

[dgmouris]

@yijizhang-nucs I appreciate the help and the response.

Experience:

1. Everything worked fine at the beginning of April 2025 when I started our spring term.
2. I taught the same class (with the same Organization setting) in the summer term (June 2025), and my students started to get the 500 error. >And if they click the assignment link again, they get the "Your GitHub account cannot accept this invitation at this time. ..." message.

We experienced the same issue at our institution and it's a bit annoying.

Thank you for the workaround let me know if you have a quick sharable script, if I have time I'll create one and share it here as well.

As for your frustration I really agree with this, I have a large number of students as well. Personally I would love that this was clearly documented how to get around this and allow outside collaborators.

@github-staff can we have someone look at this?

[jkruskie]

I am currently having the same issue and will be manually adding ~50 students via their usernames.

[kkrick-sdsu]

I am a GitHub Enterprise owner and one of the faculty that I support on GitHub Classroom just ran into this issue today. The Organization in question is part of our Enterprise. The faculty member does not recall changing any settings on their Organization and was using the same org successfully in previous semesters. I did not change any settings on the Enterprise and can't find anything relevant in the settings.

Wondering what recent change GitHub may have rolled out to potentially cause this.

[ferdv]

I am just now encountering the same problem at the beginning of the semester and managed to find a few related issues so I thought I'll share. It might be something to do with forking and outside collaborators. I have 300+ students in my class, this is going to be exhausting.

• https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/163483
• https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/153390
• https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/163496 (reference to Classroom at https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/163496#discussioncomment-13596600)

[kkrick-sdsu]

Thanks for sharing! It feels like GitHub is making changes to Enterprise features without considering how this may impact GitHub Education and GitHub Classrooms associated with an Enterprise.

[ferdv]

That's my feeling too. At this point, I can just replace Classroom with a bunch of scripts using the Github CLI

[ferdv]

Just reporting on my solution I had to implement over the weekend based on the suggestion by https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/165463#discussioncomment-14214049 (thank you @yijizhang-nucs!).

I figured out I don't need to collect students' Github.com emails beforehand. If I just use their university emails for the invites, they will be asked to add and verify that email address if they haven't done so already. So I just broadcast a message for them to be on the lookout for an invite email and accept it before accepting the Classroom email, the collect all email addresses into a text file, one address per line, and use the following BASH script using the gh command from above.

#!/bin/bash

if [[ "$#" -lt 1 ]]; then
    echo "Usage: $0 <org> < <file.txt>"
    echo
    echo "Example:"
    echo "  $0 Foo < emails.txt"
    echo "     - will send an invitation to organization Foo to every email in the file emails.txt"
    exit 1
fi

GH_ORG=$1

echo "// Running at `date`"

while IFS= read -r email; do
  echo // gh api "orgs/${GH_ORG}/invitations" -f email="$email" -f role=direct_member
  gh api "orgs/${GH_ORG}/invitations" -f email="$email" -f role=direct_member
  echo
  sleep 1
done

It outputs the JSON responses from the API along with comments (which is not strict JSON), so I just save the output into a log file and check which requests didn't go through. I use it as

$ ./invite MyOrganization < emails.txt > log.json

Note, there is a 1 second delay after each request as per Github's API recommendations.

Maybe this will save somebody some headaches.