OrgManager: Free invite system for your GitHub Orgs

Originally published on my blog

GitHub Organizations are an awesome way to manage open-source teams or group your brand’s open-source projects, and they’re also a great way to collaborate with strangers from all around the world. This “open GitHub Organizations” are organizations that everyone can join if they ask to.

I noticed that GitHub organizations are missing a better invite system: you can add people to an organization, but you can’t setup a “Join this organization” button to appear at the top of the organization page.

This means future members need to:

1. Ask for an invite (most “open organizations” have an issue you can comment to get one).
2. Wait until an administrator sees your message and sends you an invite.

This process takes from one day to one week approx.

When I discovered this, I was learning Laravel, so I thought I could build a small application using Laravel and the GitHub API to make the process faster and easier. The result was called OrgManager.

For your organization, using OrgManager is simple: go to the home page and click on the login link. Then, you’ll be redirected to GitHub, where you need to authorize OrgManager to administer the organizations you want to use it with. Then, you’ll be presented with a dashboard, where you can get the link you have to share with your users, password-protect the page, invite users to GitHub Organization Teams, sync or delete the organization from OrgManager.

For your users, it’s easy peasy lemon squeezy: they open the link you shared and fill in their GitHub username and a captcha, and they’re in!

Want to contribute to OrgManager?

We’ve set up an “up-for-grabs” and a “help-wanted” label, so you can easily find issues you can help with, and we also have a “beginners-only” label to help people who are making their first open source contribution!

If you have an organization, you can also register at the OrgManager Hosted Version or host it yourself.

Finally, you can donate to the project to help me cover the server costs of the hosted version, or you can tweet about it or post on facebook.

Also, don’t forget to upvote us on ProductHunt!