Archiving github

GitHub-Backup is a small project to archive github repos to a local computer. It advertises that one reason to use it is

You are paranoid tinfoil-hat wearer who needs to back up everything in triplicate on a variety of outdated tape media.

which describes why I was searching it out perfectly.

I made a new account on my server (github) and cloned their repo.

sudo useradd -m github
sudo -i- u github
git clone git@github.com:clockfort/GitHub-Backup.git

Despite being semi-unmaintained, everything mostly works still. There were two exceptions–some major design problems around private repos. I only need to back up my public repos really, so I ‘solved’ this by issuing an Oauth token that only knows about public repos. And second, a small patch to work around a bug with User objects in the underlying Github egg:

-       os.system("git config --local gitweb.owner %s"%(shell_escape("%s <%s>"%(repo.user.name, repo.user.email.encode("utf-8"))),))
+       if hasattr(repo.user, 'email') and repo.user.email:
+               os.system("git config --local gitweb.owner %s"%(shell_escape("%s <%s>"%(repo.user.name, repo.user.email.encode("utf-8"))),))

Then I just shoved everything into a cron task and we’re good to go.

@hourly GitHub-Backup/github-backup.py -m -t  vanceza /home/github/vanceza

Edit: There’s a similar project for bitbucket I haven’t tried out: https://bitbucket.org/fboender/bbcloner

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