Scheduled change of repository visibility from private to public

[Vasiliy-Makogon]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Product Feedback

Body

Problem

People are mortal. Many developers write code "for themselves" or keep their personal projects in private repositories. If a person passes away suddenly, their work may remain locked in a private repository forever and never become accessible to anyone.

Currently, GitHub allows you to manually change repository visibility at any time, but there is no way to schedule this change in advance. This means that if the owner is no longer able to perform this action, the repository stays private indefinitely.

Proposed Solution

Add a feature that allows repository owners to schedule a future date when a private repository will automatically become public. This could be implemented as an additional option under "Settings > Danger Zone > Change repository visibility", where the user can select "Make public on a specific date".

Use Cases

• Developers who want their personal projects to be released publicly only after their death.
• Open source maintainers who want to keep a project private during initial development but release it to the public on a predetermined date.
• Companies that want to automatically open-source a project after a certain period of time without manual intervention.

Additional Context

This feature would be especially valuable for long-term archival and legacy planning, ensuring that valuable code is not lost simply because no one has the ability to change its visibility.

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[willtechdev]

@Vasiliy-Makogon there's no scheduled visibility change today. What works now:

• Move the repo to an organization and add a trusted person as a second owner. Any org owner can make it public later, without needing your account.
• An account successor (Settings → Account → Successor settings) only covers public repos, so it doesn't help with private ones. For those, the Deceased User Policy lets next of kin or an authorized person ask GitHub Support what to do with the account.

Docs:

• https://docs.github.com/en/organizations/managing-organization-settings/restricting-repository-visibility-changes-in-your-organization
• https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/creating-and-managing-repositories/access-to-repositories#about-successors
• https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/other-site-policies/github-deceased-user-policy

If this solves it, please mark it as the answer so others can find it.

[kurupdevs]

For the non-legacy use cases (timed release, a company open-sourcing after a set period), there's a DIY version that works today: a scheduled Actions workflow that flips the visibility on your target date.

name: go-public
on:
  schedule:
    - cron: "0 9 1 6 *" # adjust to your target date
jobs:
  publish:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - run: gh repo edit OWNER/REPO --visibility public
        env:
          GH_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.VISIBILITY_PAT }}

Three caveats:

1. You need a PAT with admin rights on the repo stored as a secret — the default GITHUB_TOKEN can't change visibility.
2. on.schedule only supports cron, not one-time dates. Point the cron at your target date and delete or disable the workflow after it fires (or add a date check inside the job) so it doesn't re-fire.
3. GitHub automatically disables scheduled workflows after extended repo inactivity, so for the "after I'm gone" scenario the org-owner approach @willtechdev described is more reliable. For planned releases where you're still active, this works fine.