Delete GitHub Forks 2

(REPO ORIGINALLY FORKED FROM https://github.com/yangshun/delete-github-forks BUT NO MORE COMPATIBLE)

Delete your forked GitHub repositories easily in two steps.

Note: Node 8+ is required because some new language features are used.

Motivations

Deleting GitHub repositories via the GitHub interface is a hassle; you have to enter your password followed by the name of the repository. This is not scalable if you contribute to open source a fair bit and have many forked repositories that you may not necessarily want to keep. Using this script, you can fetch a list of your GitHub repositories and delete the unwanted repositories in one go.

Getting Started

Clone this repository.

$ npm install

Create in your root folder the gitignored file .env and put inside something like:

export GITHUB_API=https://api.github.com
export GITHUB_ACCESS_TOKEN=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
export GITHUB_USER=yyyyy

To get the access token, go to this page and create a token that has the following permissions: public_repo and delete_repo.

Usage

Firstly, run the following command to fetch all your forked repositories.

$ npm run fetch

A JSON file, reposForDeletion.json containing an array of your forked repositories will be written into the /data directory.

The repositories inside reposForDeletion.json will be deleted. It is an irreversible operation. Use with great caution!.

So, before running the next command, manually inspect reposForDeletion.json and remove the forked repositories that you want to keep.

Finally, to delete all the repos in reposForDeletion.json, run

$ npm run delete

Done. It's that easy.

Whitelists

A better option to avoid deleting important forks is to create a whitelist.json config file. To create it run

$ node src/fetch-repos.js
$ mv data/reposForDeletions.json data/whitelist.json

After, edit the whitelist.json file, leave in it only the repos you don't want to delete and run again

$ node src/fetch-repos.js

You will see that the new reposForDeletion.json file does not contains the whitelisted repos.

History

Any time you delete some forked repo, a report json file will be created in the history directory. This way you know which repos you deleted and when. Also, you will see which repos were not deleteable and which error was returned by the GitHub API.

Wanted

The scripts can be potentially modified to work on an organization's repositories as well just by changing the URLs. Pull requests to support this feature are welcome.

License

MIT