How to outsource with Github?

I am working with a company that wants to outsource the development of new features on one of our projects. We开发者_开发知识库 have a github account and I am wondering how I can give the outsourcees restricted access to the project repo on that account.

Is there a way to limit commits and pushes on a repo to a specific branch with a specific set of credentials?

I've heard about forking but have never really used it. Is that what I'm looking for?

Update:

It's funny looking back on this question now after three more years working in the industry. I had a lot to learn.

Also, people are marking this post as off-topic, but I'm not sure that a more appropriate stack exchange site existed when I originally posted it.

Anyway, as people have pointed out, having the outsourcees fork the project would have been the correct way to handle this situation. They would then have made pull requests which I could have reviewed and approved without giving them full access to our account.

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I suppose you could fork the repository, grant access to that, and then keep pulling the changes into your main one - think of a fork as a private branch in this case.

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Yes, forking does that for you. I think if you don't have experience working in a distributed environment, using your private Github repo, it would be wise to assess your team of developers (whom you're outsourcing the work to) for their expertise on usage of Github as a distributed/virtual team. Generally, if they are new to Github, it's really difficult to get them have a hang of it and get things right since the start.

Well, I see that I am responding to a very old thread but if it's still the case, I would recommend getting only the developers who have worked sufficiently well using Github. Indeed, as a member of an IT consulting company, I manage a team of devs that do it regularly and I understand the challenges developers face while starting to use Github, particularly because of enormous flexibility Github offers.