How to Backup all your GitHub repositories to your NAS

Many developers do not realize this, but we might lose access to all our code base if, for some reason, GitHub is down (This would be a worst case scenario, better be safe than sorry).

As part of our conservative backup strategy, we run a daily backup of all our repositories into our Synology NAS.

Save this script, edit the variables and run it daily to be able to backup your GitHub repositories.

This supports private and public repositories (and paginate all available repos).


#!/bin/bash

# Edit this values
BACKUP_PATH="/volume1/homes/YOUR_USERNAME/github" # Backup destination
OAUTH_TOKEN="" # Token from https://github.com/settings/tokens
GITHUB_USERNAME="" # You github usernmame
 
# Fetch all repositories
ALL_REPOSITORIES=""
fetch_repositories() {
	PAGE=1
	while :
	do
		echo "Getting page $PAGE"
	
	    if [ -z "$OAUTH_TOKEN" ]
	    then
	      PAGE_REPOSITORIES=`curl "https://api.github.com/users/${GITHUB_USERNAME}/repos?per_page=100&page=${PAGE}" | jq -r '.[] | "\(.name),\(.full_name),\(.private),\(.html_url)"'`
	    else
	      PAGE_REPOSITORIES=`curl -H "Authorization: token ${OAUTH_TOKEN}" -s "https://api.github.com/user/repos?per_page=100&page=${PAGE}" | jq -r '.[] | "\(.name),\(.full_name),\(.private),\(.html_url)"'`
	    fi

	    TOTAL_PAGE_REPOSITORIES=`echo $PAGE_REPOSITORIES | tr -cd " " | wc -c`

		ALL_REPOSITORIES="${ALL_REPOSITORIES} ${PAGE_REPOSITORIES}"

	    if [ "$TOTAL_PAGE_REPOSITORIES" = "99" ]; then
		    let PAGE++
	    else
	    	break;
	    fi
	done
}
 

fetch_repositories

TOTAL_REPOSITORIES=`echo $ALL_REPOSITORIES | tr -cd " " | wc -c`

echo "Backing up $TOTAL_REPOSITORIES repositories"

COUNT=1
for REPO in $ALL_REPOSITORIES
do
    REPO_NAME=`echo ${REPO} | cut -d ',' -f1`
    REPO_FULLNAME=`echo ${REPO} | cut -d ',' -f2`
    REPO_OWNER=`echo ${REPO_FULLNAME} | cut -d '/' -f1`
    PRIVATE_FLAG=`echo ${REPO} | cut -d ',' -f3`
    ARCHIVE_URL=`echo ${REPO} | cut -d ',' -f4`
    ARCHIVE_URL="${ARCHIVE_URL}/archive/master.zip"
    mkdir -p "${BACKUP_PATH}/${REPO_OWNER}"
    FILE_PATH="${BACKUP_PATH}/${REPO_OWNER}/${REPO_NAME}.zip"
    curl -H "Authorization: token ${OAUTH_TOKEN}" -L ${ARCHIVE_URL} -o ${FILE_PATH} -s
    echo "${COUNT}/${TOTAL_REPOSITORIES}: Saved ${FILE_PATH}"
	let COUNT++
done

echo "Done!"

To run this task daily:

On Synology’s DSM: Go to Control Panel > Task Scheduler > Create User defined script, and on the task settings set the script to bash /volume1/homes/YOUR_USERNAME/backup-scripts/github.sh

On any server: Add the following crontab 0 0 * * * bash /volume1/homes/YOUR_USERNAME/backup-scripts/github.sh

This article is brought you by tonoïd – we are a micro-startup studio building small businesses that are profitable and solve a specific problem without any external funding nor billion-dollar market-size. Most notably, RefurbMe, a comparison site for refurbished products – and Notion Automations.

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