GitHub Backup

Automatically backup your GitHub repositories to your local machine.

This tool is designed to automatically pull the list of GitHub repositories from one, or more, GitHub organizations and clone (or fetch) them to your local machine. It is designed to be run as part of a scheduled backup process with the ultimate goal of ensuring that you have a local copy of all of your GitHub repositories should the unthinkable happen.

Features

  • Backup Multiple Organizations, automatically gathering the full list of repositories for each organization through the GitHub API.
  • Repo Allowlists/Denylists to provide fine-grained control over which repositories are backed up and which are not.
  • GitHub Enterprise Support for those of you running your own GitHub instances and not relying on GitHub.com.

Example

# Run the tool directly
./github-backup --config config.yaml

# Or run it in a container
docker run \
  -v $(pwd)/config.yaml:/config.yaml \
  -v $(pwd)/backups:/backups \
  ghcr.io/SierraSoftworks/github-backup:main \
    --config /config.yaml

Configuration

backup_path: "/backups" # Where to store the backups

# Run a backup every hour (will use `git fetch` for existing copies)
# You can also omit this if you want to run a one-shot backup
schedule: "0 * * * *"
github:
  token: "<your-github-token>" # Optional if you are only backing up public repositories

backups:
  - user: "my-user"
  - org: "my-org"
    filters:
      - !Include ["my-repo-1", "my-repo-2"]
      - !NonFork

OpenTelemetry Reporting

In addition to the standard logging output, this tool also supports reporting metrics to an OpenTelemetry-compatible backend. This can be useful for tracking the performance of the tool over time and configuring monitoring in case backups start to fail.

Configuration is conducted through the use of environment variables:

OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=https://your-otel-collector:4317
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS=X-API-KEY=your-api-key
OTEL_TRACES_SAMPLER=traceidratio
OTEL_TRACES_SAMPLER_ARG=1.0

Filters

This tool allows you to configure filters to control which GitHub repositories are backed up and which are not. Filters are used within the backups section of your configuration file and can be specified on a per-user or per-organization basis.

!Include [repo1, repo2, ...]

Only include the specified repositories in the backup. This filter matches names case-insensitively.

!Exclude [repo1, repo2, ...]

Exclude the specified repositories from the backup. This filter matches names case-insensitively.

!Fork

Only include repositories which are forks of other repositories.

!NonFork

Only include repositories which are not forks of other repositories.

!Private

Only include private repositories.

!Public

Only include public repositories.

!Archived

Only include archived repositories.

!NonArchived

Only include repositories which are not archived.