Next level repository management with Octoherd

I recently sat down with Gregor, maintainer of JavaScrit Octokit, to talk about managing multiple repositories as a maintainer. The management of multiple repositories in an organization can become time-consuming and Gregor shared project, Octoherd as a way to script updates across multiple repositories.

octoherd / cli

CLI to run a octoherd scripts on one or multiple repositories

Octoherd CLI

CLI to run a custom script on one or multiple repositories

Usage

$ octoherd.js [script] [repos...]
Positionals
  script  Path to *.js script. Must be an ES Module
  repos   One or multiple arrays in the form of 'repo-owner/repo-name'.
          'repo-owner/*' will find all repositories for one owner. '*' will find
          all repositories the user has access to                  [default: []]

Options:
  --help                      Show help                                [boolean]
  --version                   Show version number                      [boolean]
  --octoherd-token            Requires the "public_repo" scope for public
                              repositories, "repo" scope for private
                              repositories.                  [string] [required]
  --octoherd-cache            Cache responses for debugging. Creates a ./cache
                              folder if flag is set. Override by passing custom
                              path                                      [string]
  --octoherd-debug            Show debug logs         [boolean] [default: false]
  --octoherd-bypass-confirms  Bypass prompts to confirm mutating requests
                                                      [boolean] [default: false]

The script must export a script function which takes three parameters:

export async function script(octokit, repository, options) {
  // do something here
}

• octokit is…

View on GitHub

In our example, Gregor manages to updates the branch protection rules for multiple repositories using one script.

git clone https://github.com/octoherd/scripts.git
npx @octoherd/cli \
  --octoherd-token 0123456789012345678901234567890123456789 \
  scripts/sync-branch-protections/script.js \
  "octoherd/*"\
  --template "octoherd/cli"

If you have ideas for scripts that would help you manage common tasks across GitHub repositories that you would like to automate, considering dropping them in the octoherd/scripts issues.

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