github-backup is a simple tool you run in a git repository you cloned from GitHub. It backs up everything GitHub publishes about the repository, including branches, tags, other forks, issues, comments, wikis, milestones, pull requests, and watchers.

Installation

git clone git://github.com/joeyh/github-backup
cd github-backup
make

(You will need ghc, hslogger, and MissingH installed first.)

Or use cabal:

cabal install github-backup --bindir=$HOME/bin

(Cabal is bundled with the Haskell Platform.)

Use

Run github-backup with no parameters, inside a git repository cloned from GitHub to back up that repository.

Or, run github-backup username to clone and back up all of a GitHub user's repositories. (Also works for organization names.)

Why backup GitHub repositories

There are a couple of reasons to want to back this stuff up:

• In case something happens to GitHub. More generally because keeping your data in the cloud and relying on the cloud to back it up is foolish.

• So you can keep working on your repository while on a plane, or on a remote beach or mountaintop. Just like Linus intended.

What to expect

Each time you run github-backup, it will find any new forks on GitHub. It will add remotes to your repository for the forks, using names like github_torvalds_subsurface. It will fetch from every fork.

It downloads metadata from each fork. This is stored into a branch named "github". Each fork gets a directory in there, like torvalds_subsurface. Inside the directory there will be some files, like torvalds_subsurface/watchers. There may be further directories, like for comments: torvalds_subsurface/comments/1.

You can follow the commits to the github branch to see what information changed on GitHub over time.

The format of the files in the github branch is currently Haskell serialized data types. This is plain text, and readable, if you squint.

Limitations

github-backup is repository-focused. It does not try to back up other information from GitHub. In particular, social network stuff, like users who are following you, is not backed up.

github-backup does not log into git, so it cannot backup private repositories.

github-backup will find and backup forks of a repository, and all forks of those forks, etc. However, it cannot go up the fork tree. So if your GitHub repositoriy is a fork of something else, the something else won't be backed up. There is an easy solution though. Just add the parent as a git remote. Then github-backup will find it, and back it up.

Notes added to commits and lines of code don't get backed up yet. There is only recently API support for this.

The labels that can be added to issues and milestones are not backed up. Neither are the hooks. They could be, but don't seem important enough for the extra work involved. Yell if you need them.

github-backup re-downloads all issues, comments, and so on each time it's run. This may be slow if your repo has a lot of them, or even if it just has a lot of forks.

Bear in mind that this uses the GitHub API; don't run it every 5 minutes. GitHub rate limits the API to 5000 requests per hour. However, github-backup does do an incremental backup, picking up where it left off, so will complete the backup eventually even if it's rate limited.

Author

github-backup was written by Joey Hess joey@kitenet.net

It is made possible thanks to:

• Mike Burns's haskell github library
• GitHub, for providing an API exposing this data.