stararchiver

Current version: 1.0.0

What does it do?

Given a GitHub username, stararchiver looks up every repository that user has starred via the GitHub REST API, clones them all to disk, and optionally compresses them into a single zip file.

stararchiver_<username>_<timestamp>/
  author1-repo1/
  author1-repo2/
  ...
  author2-repo3/

Requirements

• Python 3.9+
• git (required)
• Internet access to api.github.com

Python's built-in zipfile module is used for compression, so no external zip binary is needed.

Install

pip install stararchiver

Usage

stararchiver <github-username>

Clone over SSH

By default repositories are cloned over HTTPS, which works without any extra setup. To clone over SSH (requires an SSH key registered with GitHub):

stararchiver <github-username> --ssh

Compress repositories into a single zip file

stararchiver <github-username> -c

Optionally delete the cloned data afterwards (the zip is kept):

stararchiver <github-username> -c -d

Specify the output directory

stararchiver <github-username> -o ~/starred_repos

Provide a GitHub token

The unauthenticated GitHub API allows 60 requests/hour. Starred-list pagination consumes roughly one request per 100 stars, so long star lists hit that ceiling quickly. Passing a token raises the limit to 5,000 requests/hour.

Either pass it explicitly or export it in your environment (recommended, so it never ends up in your shell history):

export GITHUB_TOKEN=ghp_xxx
stararchiver <github-username>
# equivalent:
stararchiver <github-username> -t ghp_xxx

Both fine-grained and classic personal access tokens are supported. Tokens only need public read access; no scopes beyond public data are required.

Other options

Full details are always available via stararchiver -h.

pip packaging

View the stararchiver package on PyPI.

Build a new pip package

./build.sh

Upload a new package to PyPI

./update-pip.sh

Development

Run straight from a checkout (no install needed). The only dependency is requests.

On Homebrew-managed Python, pip refuses to install packages outside a virtual environment (PEP 668), so create one first:

python3 -m venv ~/.venvs/stararchiver
source ~/.venvs/stararchiver/bin/activate
pip install requests
./stararchiver <github-username> --dry-run

Alternatively, install the stararchiver command itself from the local checkout with pipx (no PyPI upload needed):

brew install pipx
pipx install .
stararchiver <github-username> --dry-run