You can enable Code Quality for a single repository, or for every repository in an organization at once. Enabling at the organization level gives all your teams a consistent quality baseline with a single change, while enabling per repository lets you target specific projects or roll out gradually.
Prerequisites
- An enterprise owner must have allowed Code Quality in your enterprise. See Allowing use of GitHub Code Quality in your enterprise.
- GitHub Actions must be enabled because Code Quality uses actions to run each CodeQL analysis.
- To get the full benefit of the feature, your repository should include one of the languages supported for quality analysis by CodeQL. See Supported languages.
Enabling Code Quality for your repository
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On GitHub, navigate to the main page of the repository.
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Under your repository name, click Settings. If you cannot see the "Settings" tab, select the dropdown menu, then click Settings.
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In the sidebar, under "Security", click Code quality to display the "Code quality" page.
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Click Enable code quality.
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Review the information on the Code quality page:
- Languages: If you want to disable CodeQL analysis for any of the languages, clear the associated check box.
- Runner type: If you want to use a different runner, choose Labeled runner and define the Runner label. See Using GitHub-hosted runners and Using labels with self-hosted runners.
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Click Save changes to save your configuration for Code Quality.
If your organization has configured caching of private registries, these will be available for code quality analysis to use to resolve dependencies. See Giving security features access to private registries.
Enabling Code Quality for your organization
At the organization level, you control Code Quality with a single Repository access setting. This gives you granular options, from enabling every repository to targeting a specific list or a dynamic filter, so you can pilot Code Quality intentionally and roll it out at your own pace. Repositories within your selection are enabled, and repositories outside your selection are disabled.
For the available access options, and how filtering and enforcement work, see Code Quality enablement across organizations and enterprises.
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On GitHub, navigate to the main page of the organization.
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Under your organization name, click Settings. If you cannot see the "Settings" tab, select the dropdown menu, then click Settings.
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In the sidebar, under "Security", click Code quality.
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Under "Repository access", select an option from the dropdown menu.
- If you selected Selected repositories..., choose the repositories you want to enable.
- If you selected Matching a filter..., define your filter.
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Optionally, to prevent repository administrators from changing these settings, enable Enforce access.
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If your change enables or disables Code Quality on any repositories, a "Review enablement and billing changes" dialog appears, showing the total number of enabled and disabled repositories and the associated costs. Review the details, then click Confirm.
Your changes are saved automatically and begin to propagate immediately. In large organizations, it can take several minutes for the changes to apply across all repositories.
If you're rolling out the feature across many teams, we recommend you pilot on a small group and tune your quality thresholds before you enable everywhere. See Rolling out GitHub Code Quality at scale.
Next steps
- Add code coverage: Upload reported code coverage from your test suite to see coverage results directly on pull requests. See Setting up code coverage for your repository.
- For your organization: Understand the code health of your repositories at a glance. See Exploring GitHub Code Quality results in your organization.