• Welcome to Digital Innovation at Marks and Spencer
  • Introduction
  • Getting Access
    • Adding to the People repository
    • Maintaining accurate Profile Information
    • Enabling 2FA for authentication
  • Repositories
    • Public and Private repositories
    • Creating Repositories
    • Team membership

This is the official GitHub location for Marks and Spencer, London UK.

If you would like access to the private repositories that we have on GitHub then you need a sponsor (team leader/manager) to invite you into the organisation. The sponsor must be an existing member who will validate and takes full responsibility for you joining.

The sponsor needs to add you into the file user.csv within the DigitalInnovation/People repository, create a branch with the request in and generate a new pull request. When this pull request is merged the user will automatically be added to the org. Please check to make sure the user is not already listed, and that the users profile details are accurate and correct. All requests are validated - in particular any requests for new bot accounts and those requests that are approved will get an invite email sent to them - they will need to click on the link to join.

If you are a newbie to this organisation - please make sure you have accurate profile information on your account first, to pass some of the validation checks.

To remain a member of the organisation, you must maintain your Profile Information - this need to be accurate and complete. This includes ensuring the Name and Company fields are filled in with the correct information; and ideally having a photo of yourself on the profile too.

Members who do not have complete profile information will be removed from the Organisation automatically and only restored when the profile is correctly maintained.

We require all accounts to have 2FA enabled on them to have access. This is typically achieved via an SMS based token to your mobile phone and required when signing into your account or performing certain actions. When you have enabled 2FA the only way to access your account is via using a token alongside your password. If you lose your 2FA device then please make sure you have your access-codes downloaded and stored safe otherwise the account is forever lost and not recoverable. To enable 2FA visit here.

Repositories are where code artifacts are stored. At M&S we have lots of repositories (over 900). Please ensure you use the correct repository for the right project and follow good branch/merge practices as established by your team.

Most of our repositories are private and only accessible to members of the organisation. If you create a new repo please make sure it starts off private and you get all the correct approvals before changing it to public and that a valid and suitable license is attached.

By default always create repositories as private and have consideration as to why a new repository is needed, what purpose it solves and why an existing repo cannot be used or extended instead.

Repositories must be given acceptable, meaningful names our criteria for repository names is as follows. Always use full words and separate these with dashes. Please ensure any new ones created meet this (otherwise they will be deleted):

• Descriptive
• Readable
• Consistent
• Contextual
• Future-friendly
• Extensible
• Reusable

Ideally they should start with the Business Unit or area they relate to, the project/programme and then their purpose.

By default everyone has full Read permissions across all repositories. To get write/admin permissions you will need to be added to the correct team for a given repository. The person who initially creates the repository is the first administrator for associating teams to that repository.

There are occasions where repos can end up detached without any owners left. If this happens and you need to update a repo then please ask on slack and we can reassociate the repo/team to a new owner.