auto-pr

A command line tool to perform bulk updates across multiple GitHub repositories.

How to install

With pipx (recommended):

pipx install auto-pr

With pip:

pip install auto-pr

Usage

Init

First initialise the project directory by running the init command within an empty directory.

auto-pr init --api-key=<github_token> --ssh-key-file=<path-to-ssh-key>

Where <github_token> is a GitHub personal access token which has repo and user:user:email scope.

Next modify the generated config.yaml file with your desired configurations.

credentials:
  api_key: <github_token>
  ssh_key_file: /path/to/ssh/key/to/push/.ssh/id_rsa
pr:
  body: >
    Body of the PR that will be generated

    Can be multi-line :)
  branch: auto-pr # The branch name to use when making changes
  message: Replace default pipelines with modules # Commit message
  title: 'My awesome change' # Title of the PR
  draft: True # Whether to create the PR as a draft
repositories: # Rules that define what repos to update
  - mode: add
    match_owner: <org/user>
update_command:
  - touch
  - my-file

Using Environment Variables for Credentials

To avoid storing credentials in plain text within config.yaml, you can use environment variable expansion with the ${VAR_NAME} syntax:

credentials:
  api_key: ${GITHUB_API_KEY}
  ssh_key_file: ${HOME}/.ssh/id_rsa

Then set the environment variables before running auto-pr:

export GITHUB_API_KEY=ghp_your_token_here
export HOME=/home/username
auto-pr pull

Environment variables can be used in multiple ways:

• Full replacement: api_key: ${GITHUB_API_KEY}
• Embedded in paths: ssh_key_file: ${HOME}/.ssh/id_rsa
• Multiple variables: ssh_key_file: ${USER_HOME}/${KEY_DIR}/id_rsa

If a referenced environment variable is not set, auto-pr will display a clear error message indicating which variable is missing.

Alternatively, if you wish to keep your API Key outside of config.yaml without modifying the config file, you can set the env var APR_API_KEY with your GitHub Token

Using a Custom Repositories Directory

By default, auto-pr clones repositories into a repos/ subdirectory within your working directory. If you already have repositories cloned locally (e.g., >1k repositories), you can configure auto-pr to use your existing directory instead:

Option 1: Config file

Add custom_repos_dir to your config.yaml:

credentials:
  api_key: ${GITHUB_API_KEY}
  ssh_key_file: ${HOME}/.ssh/id_rsa
pr:
  title: 'My awesome change'
  branch: auto-pr
  message: Update dependencies
  body: Automated update
  draft: false
repositories:
  - mode: add
    match_owner: myorg
update_command:
  - echo
  - "Hello"
custom_repos_dir: /path/to/existing/repos  # Point to your existing cloned repos

The custom_repos_dir field supports environment variable expansion:

custom_repos_dir: ${HOME}/all-my-repos

Option 2: CLI flag

Use the --repos-dir option when running commands:

auto-pr --repos-dir=/path/to/existing/repos pull
auto-pr --repos-dir=/path/to/existing/repos test
auto-pr --repos-dir=/path/to/existing/repos run

The CLI option takes precedence over the config file setting.

Important notes:

• The custom repos directory must exist before running auto-pr init
• auto-pr will use the existing cloned repositories and apply its cleanup operations as normal
• This is useful for organizations with many repositories to avoid duplicating disk space

Repositories

You can define the list of repositories to pull and build into the database to update using a list of rules.

• mode - either add or remove - used to either match or negate
• public (optional) - pull only public or private, leave out for both
• archived (optional) - archived or non-archived, leave out for both
• match_owner (optional) - the owner or user to pull
• match_name (optional) - a list of regular expressions to match against to pull

The flags of the filter rules are optional not specifying will run the command on all repositories that the token has access too.

Update Command

This is the list containing the command to be executed along with the arguments passed to it. It will be executed from the root of each repository that is processed.

If an error occurs during the execution it will be displayed in the output but will not halt the execution.

See example commands

Pull

After you have configured the project you can now pull the repositories down that match your rules.

auto-pr pull

This will generate a db.json file within your workdir containing a list of mapped repositories and their state.

This command can be run multiple times, if there are new matching repositories found they will be merged into the existing database.

If you would like to use your globally set config, you can pass the option --use-global-git-config when pulling the repos. If you had already pulled the repos before this and you would like to change the config for those repos, you would also need to pass --update-repos alongside the global-git-config option when pulling.

Test

Once the pull command has finished setting up the work directory you can now run test to check what the changes that will be made by the script will yield.

Run

When you're confident with the changes output from the test command you can finally execute run.

auto-pr run

This will perform the changes to a branch on the locally cloned repository and push the branch upstream with the information you provided within config.yaml.

By default, the commits will be associated with your primary email and name, which were set on the repo level for those repos when you ran auto-pr pull. If you would like to use your global git config for the repos that you already pulled, you need to run pull again with:

auto-pr pull --update-repos --use-global-git-config

See --help for more information about other commands and their usage.

Reset

You can reset the list of repos in db.json using auto-pr reset all, or auto-pr reset from FILE

When using auto-pr reset from FILE, the list of repos should be provided as a newline separated list of repos like <owner>/<name>, e.g:

getyourguide/test
getyourguide/auto-pr

Development

For information on setting up a development environment and contributing to auto-pr, see DEVELOPMENT.md.

Security

For sensitive security matters please contact security@getyourguide.com.

Legal

Copyright 2021 GetYourGuide GmbH.

auto-pr is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See LICENSE for the full text.