In 2018, I built a single-purpose tool: bulk delete GitHub repositories.
It was originally just for myself and my classmates: Select repos, click delete, confirm. The whole thing was maybe 200 lines of code.
I wrote a Medium article about it that got 25,000 views and the tool gained over 6,500 developers, most of them in the last four years without me touching the product.
Even though it was nice having people use my tool, I never really gave much thought into expanding it until recently. I did a quick analysis of common requests on GitHub’s Discussion board, and there are many in the category of bulk management.
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What I Found in the Forum Threads
I always thought of participation as binary: a user either uses your tool or they don’t. So I never tried to understand what my users actually wanted. But then I found something revealing.
The single most telling thread was this one: “Create groups of repositories” — 500+ reactions, 150+ comments, and a comment that stopped me cold:
“People have been asking for this for more than a decade. GitHub doesn’t seem to care or have any desire to offer it.”
There were many of these multi-year accumulations of developers who had simply given up expecting GitHub to fix their problems. Many going back multiple years.
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The themes that kept appearing across threads
Group creation and tagging. Organize repos by group (work, personal, school) — and take actions on the whole group at once.
Visibility control: Moving repos between public and private.
Repository staleness: A way to sort by “what hasn’t been touched in 3 years” or “actively maintained.”
—Collaborator cleanup: A way to add/remove collaborators across repos after a project ends, someone leaves a company, or a team gets reorganized.
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So I Expanded RepoSweeper
RepoSweeper in 2026 is not the tool I built in 2018. It’s a full GitHub repository management toolkit.
I took all the scattered, unanswered requests by Github and built them into RepoSweeper’s dashboard.
- Bulk archive.
- Bulk privacy management
- Collaborator cleanup (add/remove)
- Staleness scoring and sorting (act on the least used repos first)
Combined, the dashboard is now closer to a management console than a deletion tool.
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Try It
RepoSweeper— free forever:
Sign in with GitHub. No install. Start managing your repos in 60 seconds.
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What’s your biggest GitHub management headache? I read every comment.
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If you use RepoSweeper, I’m actively reading every piece of feedback. Reply to this article, email reposweeper@gmail.com, or just describe your problem — this product has always been shaped by the people who use it.
Top comments (1)
One thing I didn't include in the article — I just checked the old DynamoDB export from the original tool. The data only goes back to 2022, meaning the 2018-2022 peak years are just gone. No way to know exactly how many people used it during that period. Conservative estimate is somewhere north of 10k total, but honestly I'll never know.