• github2mr
  • Brief mr Example
• Installation
• Configuration / Usage
  • Other Git Hosts
• Github Setup

Many Github users have a large number of repositories upon which they work, and managing them all can sometimes be difficult.

One excellent tool which helps a lot is the myrepos package, containing a binary named mr, which allows you to run many operations upon multiple repositories with one command. (It understands git, mercurial, darcs, cvs, and many other types of revision-control systems.)

This repository contains a simple command-line client which allows you to easily generate a configuration file containing all your github repositories fetching them via the Github API with various filtering and limiting options.

The end result of using mr and github2mr is that you should be able to clone all your remote github repositories, and update them easily with only a couple of commands which is great for when you work/develop/live on multiple machines.

Let us pretend I'm moving to a new machine; first of all I export the list of all my remote repositories to a configuration file using this tool:

github2mr > ~/Repos/.mrconfig.github

• NOTE: The first time you create a new configuration file you will need to mark it as being trusted, because it is possible for configuration files to contain arbitrary shell-commands.
  • Mark the configuration file as trusted by adding it's name to ~/.mrtrust:
    • echo ~/Repos/.mrconfig.github >> ~/.mrtrust

Now that we've populated a configuration-file we can tell mr to checkout each of those repositories:

mr --jobs 8 --config ~/Repos/.mrconfig.github

Later in the week I can update all the repositories which have been cloned, pulling in any remote changes that have been made from other systems:

mr --jobs 8 --config ~/Repos/.mrconfig.github update

NOTE: If you prefer you can just use update all the time, mr will checkout a repository if it is missing as part of the update process. I'm using distinct flags here for clarity. Please read the mr-manpage to look at the commands it understands.

You should be able to install this application using the standard golang approach. For go>=1.13 go modules must be enabled:

$ GO111MODULE=on go get github.com/skx/github2mr

For earlier versions:

$ go get github.com/skx/github2mr

If you prefer you can download the latest binary release, for various systems.

Once installed you'll need to configure your github token, which you can generate from withing your github settings.

you can either pass the token as an argument to the tool (via github2mr -token=xxxxx), or store it in the environment in the variable GITHUB_TOKEN:

 $ export GITHUB_TOKEN=xxxxx
 $ github2mr [options]

You can run github2mr -help to see available options, but in brief:

• You can choose a default prefix to clone your repositories to.
  • By default all repositories will be located at ~/Repos/${git_host}.
• You can exclude all-organizational repositories.
  • Or the reverse, ignoring all personal-repositories.
• You can exclude repositories by name.
• You can default to cloning repositories via HTTP, instead of SSH.
• By default all archived repositories are excluded.

This tool can be configured to point at other systems which use the same API as the public-facing Github site.

To use it against a self-hosted Github Enterprise installation, for example, simply specify the URL:

 $ export GITHUB_TOKEN=xxxxx
 $ github2mr -api=https://git.example.com/ [options]

It has also been tested against an installation of gitbucket which can be configured a similar way - however in this case you'll find that you receive an error "401 bad credentials" unless you add the -auth-header-token flag:

  $ export GITHUB_TOKEN=xxxxx
  $ github2mr -api=https://git.example.com/ -auth-header-token

This seems to be related to the OAUTH header the library I'm using sends, by default it will send a HTTP request looking like this:

GET /api/v3/users/skx/repos HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost:9999
User-Agent: go-github
Accept: application/vnd.github.mercy-preview+json
Authorization: Bearer SECRET-TOKEN
Accept-Encoding: gzip

Notice that the value of the Authorization-header begins with Bearer? Gitbucket prefers to see Authorization: token SECRET-VALUE-HERE.

This repository is configured to run tests upon every commit, and when pull-requests are created/updated. The testing is carried out via .github/run-tests.sh which is used by the github-action-tester action.

Releases are automated in a similar fashion via .github/build, and the github-action-publish-binaries action.

Currently these are reporting failures; but I'm in the process of fixing them.