I would love to see this elevated to a request: my use case is that, as a professor delivering online content to students and teachers, folder-level privacy would greatly facilitate my ability to put an entire course together (e.g. labs along with lab solutions) and make it available to students, without also giving away the answers to labs. Is there an appropriate place to make this a feature request?

Thanks for the suggestion. I realize this wasn’t really in keeping with a true “Git” workflow, but it so many people use Github in different ways I thought it was worth asking. I didn’t thinking about creating a duplicate without the solutions: total face-palm on my part. That’s a great work-around so thanks for bringing it up!

You can use a trick. You can automatically create a public part of your private repository.

For example: you can use gitexporter command. gitexporter can create a new git repo with only allowed files and the same commit history.

1. Create config.json:

{
    "forceReCreateRepo": true,
    "targetRepoPath": "my-open-source-repo",
    "sourceRepoPath": ".",
    "allowedPaths": ["*"],
    "ignoredPaths": ["secrets/*"]
}

Run command npx gitexporter config.json.

Folder my-open-source-repo is a new git repo that does not include "secrets/*" files

Then you can push my-open-source-repo to a new open-source GitHub repository.

Like so:

cd my-open-source-repo
git remote set-url origin new.github.com/company/open-repo-name
git push origin master