Best practices for leaving your company

Changing jobs is a fact of life. If you use your GitHub user account for both personal and work purposes, there are a few things to keep in mind when you leave your company or organization.

In this article

• Leaving organizations
• Removing professional associations with personal repositories

Before you leave your company, make sure you update the following information in your user account:

• Unverify your company email address by deleting it in your Email settings. You can then re-add it without verifying to keep any associated commits linked to your account.
• Change your primary email address from your company email to your personal email.
• Verify your new primary email address.
• Change your GitHub username to remove any references to your company or organization, if necessary.

Leaving organizations

If you’ve been working with repositories that belong to an organization, you’ll want to remove yourself as a member of the organization. Note that if you are the organization owner, you should first transfer ownership of the organization to another person.

Removing professional associations with personal repositories

If you’ve been collaborating professionally with another person on repositories that belong to their personal user account, you’ll want to remove yourself as a collaborator from those repositories.

• Stop watching repositories related to your work. You won’t want those notifications anymore!

• Transfer repositories you own that others may need to continue working on after you leave.

• Delete forks that belong to you that are related to the work you were doing. Don’t worry, deleting a fork doesn’t delete the upstream repository.

• Delete local copies of your forks that may exist on your computer:

  $ rm -rf work_directory