Cleaning Up Your Github Repos
- 2 minutes read - 354 wordsI was recently reduced from the staff of the Flatiron School and, after my GitHub accounts were terminated, I still had a ton of repos that had been forked from the company’s accounts to my own. The GitHub web UI doesn’t help with bulk actions, so I scripted it.
Strategy
- Use
hub’s low-level API to generate a death list in a file - Peruse the file
- Feed the file into
hubto do the deletion
Use hub’s Low-level API to Generate a Death List in a File
Inspired by the information in rmkpatchaa’s Gist, I took the hub
program and used its low-level API + jq to generate a list of my repos:
Due to rate limits, etc. I proceeded in 100-repo chunks:
hub api "/users/sgharms/repos?per_page=100&affiliation=owner&page=1" |jq '.[] | .name' >> killnames
hub api is built to emulate the API of the curl program. So
if you’re familiar with those flags, you’re going to be very comfortable.
Notably, it uses -H for headers and -X to change HTTP verbs. The data that
are returned were copious, so we use parameters and our friend jq
to winnow things down to the list of repo names. We accumulate those names into
the file killnames using the redirect-and-append.
Peruse the File
Depending on how many repos you created, you might need to do a lot of work
here; or, maybe, it won’t be so bad. I used vim to winnow down this
population. Deletion is a pretty drastic step and I didn’t want to mess it up.
The verb peruse is the right one to do here.
Leveraging vim’s g/regex-of-thing-to-delete/d made short work of some of the
copied-by-bulk algorithm names.
Feed the File Into hub to Do the Deletion
Now comes the fun part. Ask hub api to delete for you:
while read r; do echo $r; hub delete $r; done < killnames
This will iterate through the repos and ask you to confirm deletion.
But since we carefully perused our killnames file, I added the -y flag
after delete to terminate with extreme prejudice.
Conclusion
This got me back down to a very livable forty living repos.