How can I batch archive all GitHub repositories in my account?

Question

How do I batch archive my repositories? I'd preferably want to be able to sort through them and figure out a way to not archive my active repositories.

I have hundreds of old GitHub repositories in my account since before the GitHub notifications feature, and now I get vulnerability notifications for all of them. Here's what my notifications look, for projects that were last used maybe 6 years ago:

Answer 1

Using only gh.

gh repo list --no-archived --limit 144 --visibility public --source --json nameWithOwner --jq ".[].nameWithOwner" > repos_names.txt

Set --limit to the number of repositories you have. Use vim to delete line which you don't want to archive by pressing dd on the line:

vim repos_names.txt

Run the the following command to arrive them

cat repos_names.txt | while read in; do gh repo archive -y "$in"; done

Clear after:

rm repos_names.txt

Answer 2

Note: since 2020:

• gh repo list has been released (with gh 1.7.0 in commit 00cb921, Q1 2021): it does take pagination in account, as it is similar to an alias like:

set -e

repos() {
  local owner="${1?}"
  shift 1
  gh api graphql --paginate -f owner="$owner" "$@" -f query='
    query($owner: String!, $per_page: Int = 100, $endCursor: String) {
      repositoryOwner(login: $owner) {
        repositories(first: $per_page, after: $endCursor, ownerAffiliations: OWNER) {
          nodes {
            nameWithOwner
            description
            primaryLanguage { name }
            isFork
            pushedAt
          }
          pageInfo {
            hasNextPage
            endCursor
          }
        }
      }
    }
  ' | jq -r '.data.repositoryOwner.repositories.nodes[] | [.nameWithOwner,.pushedAt,.description,.primaryLanguage.name,.isFork] | @tsv' | sort
}

repos "$@"

• gh repo list --no-archived can limit the list to your not-yet-archived repositories

• gh repo archive can then, for each element of that list, archive the GitHub repository.

---

wolfram77 also proposes in the comments:

gh repo list <org> | awk '{NF=1}1' | \
  while read in; do gh repo archive -y "$in"; done

Answer 3

You can use the GitHub API along with two tools to achieve this. I'll be using:

• Hub, but you can make direct API calls
• jq, but you can use any JSON parser

Here's how:

1. Fetch a list of all the GitHub repositories in our account, and saving them in a file:

   hub api --paginate users/amingilani/repos | jq -r '.[]."full_name"' > repos_names.txt

2. Go through that file manually, remove any repositories you don't want to archive

3. Archive all the repositories in the file:

   cat repos_names.txt | xargs -I {} -n 1 hub api -X PATCH -F archived=true /repos/{}