Disable push to specific branches on GitHub

The hooks you are looking for are pre-receive and update - the former is run once per push, the latter once per branch per push; but importantly, these are hooks on the server side.

I know that this post is pretty old, but I believe that it may still help for some of you who are looking for an answer.

Well, now it is possible on GitHub.
Recently GitHub have introduced the Protected Branches feature, which makes it possible:

Protected branches block several features of Git on a branch that a repository administrator chooses to protect. A protected branch:

• Can't be force pushed
• Can't be deleted
• Can't have changes merged into it until required status checks pass
• Can't have changes merged into it until required reviews are approved
• Can't be edited or have files uploaded to it from the web

Good luck.

Ok I got the answer from IRC after a long chat. I'll have to work with forks and pull requests, or add pre-push hooks on each dev's machine since GitHub doesn't allow per branch permissions neither pre-publish canceling hooks. Here is a part of the answers I got:

Fork the repository. then the developer can work on their own version of the repository, and doesn't have to worry about committing to the wrong branch. And then someone upstream can always merge into whatever branch should be committed into.

Yeah but we're a company and we don't want that all our devs have forks

Why not?

Well they should be able to push their branch on a common repo to work with some other devs on the same feature for example.

Have a read through https://help.github.com/articles/using-pull-requests. You can still send patches around between multiple forks. This is the model that git was built on

I know but I want to be able to see quickly in a central way the actual work on any feature/hotfix, ...

To cut a long story short: GitHub doesn't support per-branch permissions