GitHub

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Revision as of 14:12, 5 August 2018 by JustAnotherArchivist (talk | contribs) (Add python-github-backup)
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GitHub
GitHub logo
A screen shot of the GitHub home page taken on 2015-11-08
A screen shot of the GitHub home page taken on 2015-11-08
URL GitHub[IAWcite.todayMemWeb]
Status Online!
Archiving status Not saved yet
Archiving type Unknown
IRC channel #getgit (on hackint)
See also GitHub Downloads

GitHub is a software repository powered by Git. Does not seem to have any site issues, often 24 hours uptime (see site status). Looks pretty sunny at the moment, but when disaster strikes it would be a problem archiving the private repositories.

As of 12th August 2012: 1,963,652 people hosting over 3,460,582 repositories 1,117,147 public repositories are forks, which greatly reduces the amount of data required to archive it. As of 22 November 2015: There are 32,000,000 repositories, with a similar fork ratio. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest 120TB of data in git repositories.

Acquisition by Microsoft

It was reported by Bloomberg and confirmed on June 4, 2018, that Microsoft bought GitHub for 7.5 billion dollars.

A discussion into the feasibility of archiving GitHub has commenced in #getgit (on hackint).

  • Users in the FOSS community fear Microsoft's "embrace, extend, extinguish" schemes in the 1990s and 2000s and many called for a move to rival GitLab in the wake of the news.
  • LinkedIn shows how user content can be gradually taken away (by means of paywalls and login walls).

Backup tools

git itself

git clone is the simplest one (and also works outside of GitHub, obviously). However, it does not get some project data that is not stored in git, including issue reports, comments, pull requests.

When cloning a repository for archival, it is best to use the --mirror option. This mirror will include all branches and even the code associated with pull requests. (Note however that the PR code will get purged eventually by Git's GC when you create a clone from this mirror as the PR commits aren't referenced by any branches, though this can be solved by adding a line like fetch = +refs/pull/*/head:refs/remotes/origin/pr/* to the repository config file.)

To pack a clone/mirror into a single, easily handleable file, use git bundle create FILE --all inside the clone/mirror.

Other tools

github-backup runs in a git repository and chases down that information, committing it to a "github" branch. It also chases down the forks and efficiently downloads them as well.

githubarchive.org and GHTorrent are both creating archives of the GitHub "timeline", that is, all events like git pushes, forks, created issues, pull requests, etc.

codearchive.org Effort to backup all the versions of all the repos on GitHub and other sources. Slides from a talk about it.

python-github-backup can backup entire users or organisations and retrieves issues, PRs, labels, milestones, hooks, wikis, gists, and LFS data. It can also grab starred repositories and forks.

See also Software Heritage.

GitHub Replacement Engines

If we ever have to archive the data out of GitHub, the data will need to be exportable to a GitHub-style engine.

Currently[when?], the best GitHub-style engine that has a Wiki, issues, Git Repo hosting, and is free and open source to use is GitLab. The engine is used by and paid for by many major organizations, so it is likely to live on in a stable way. Other popular FOSS alternatives to GitHub include Gitea and Gogs.

We will need a complete migration system to move a git repository and all related GitHub service information of a repository to GitLab.

Things to Scrape

In case of emergency, these are the items we need to grab.

  • Git Repository - Accomplished by github-backup
    • Forked Repositories - Accomplished by github-backup
    • Notes on Commits/Lines of Code - Not supported by github-backup yet. GitHub API support exists since ca. 2011.
  • GitHub Gollum Wiki - No tool yet, but just clone the whole thing, and then push it to GitLab.
  • Releases - Tags on GitHub can have binaries attached. These are of high priority to archive.
  • Issues + Comments - Accomplished by github-backup
    • Milestones - github-backup currently does not archive this yet.
    • Labels - github-backup currently does not archive this yet.
  • Hooks - Needs some kind of tool to archive GitHub Hooks

List of Repositories

A list of repositories from GitHub API data are maintained by an archive team member at za3k.com. It scrapes continuously. Public downloads are updated once a day. This list does not include gists.

GitHub Archive

The metadata generated by the GitHub API are archived to Google BigQuery every hour by GithubArchive.

It obviously doesn't grab events dating before 2011, so a targeted repository scrape may still be ideal.

But at least it could be possible to grab all info about a single repository using Google BigQuery's free version, since it would use a low amount of CPU power. However, we need to create such an export script for it when the time comes.

External links