GitHub mirroring

A simple python script to mirror all of an organization's GitHub repositories.

This script was designed to copy all commits from GitHub to our local Gitolite server, so we always have a full archive of our GitHub account, but it will also let you just archive your GitHub repositories locally. There is a more background in this Medium post.

Getting started

To get started, clone the repository and run python github-mirror.py -h for usage information. The only additional dependency is requests. More specifically:

1. git clone https://github.com/dragonfly-science/github-mirroring.git to get the code
2. pip install requests to install dependencies
3. cd github-mirroring change into the source directory (or copy the script where you like)
4. python github-mirror.py -h run with the help flag for usage information

In order for it to access private repositories, the GitHub access token for the account needs to be set as the environment variable GITHUB_OAUTH_TOKEN.

Minimal examples

Backup up your public repositories to local storage

python github-mirror.py yourname -a user --repository-type=public

Backup your organisation's private repositories to local storage

GITHUB_OAUTH_TOKEN=becb84bde335a242707af71dae41a24f python github-mirror.py yourorganisation

First, generate a GitHub Personal Access Token, by going to Account settings > Applications on github.com. Hit the Generate new token button. The default permissions of repo, public_repo, and user are sufficient for the simple case. If you are using the webhooks, you will also need the write:repo_hook permission. Copy the generated key, a random string of characters like becb84bde335a242707af71dae41a24f. This key will need to be in the environment variable GITHUB_OAUTH_TOKEN when the command is run.

The usual warnings apply

Some effort has been made to make the script work in a range of situations, however it has only been tested in our specific usecase - mirroring an organisation's private repositories to a local Gitolite mirror. We are all care, no responsibility. Please make sure you understand what the script does before letting it loose.