Backup GitHub Repositories with gidek

Do you backup your Git repositories? If not, you should consider doing so. I might even have a solution for you if you are using GitHub: gidek. It even has some NixOS goodies packed with it.

Why Backup Git Repositories?

Git is a distributed version control system. It means that every recent clone of a Git repository is pretty much a full backup of the repository.

If you are using a centralized hosting service like GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket, you are relying on the service provider to keep your repository safe and alive. While these services are considered usually reliable, outages have happened in the past.

Also, you might want to keep a backup of your repositories for other reasons:

• You may lose access to your account.
• You might want to migrate to another service.
• Your auditors might ask for your repository backups.
• Some smart colleague might delete a branch or a tag.
• Some smarter colleague might override the history of a branch.
• If a meteor hits the Earth, you might want to have a backup of your code. I do.

How to Backup Git Repositories?

The simplest solution is to clone first:

git clone --mirror https://github.com/terremoth/awesome-hilarious-repos.git

… and update next time:

cd awesome-hilarious-repos.git && git remote update

Now, do it 101 times for your personal repositories and 186 times for your organizations’. Do it every day. And also make sure that the repository names and owners are not changed.

There are some tools you can subscribe online to, or install on your workstation to backup your Git repositories. Some of them have quite good enterprise reputation. But they are not free.

In my case, I want to stick to free and open-source software. I also want to use the same solution both at home and at work. I want to have a simple and reliable solution that I can trust and hack.

I helped myself with gidek.

gidek

gidek is a simple Haskell program that I wrote to backup my GitHub repositories. It does more or less what I described above: clones all the repositories of interest, and updates them later.

But there are a few more considerations handled by gidek:

1. It uses GitHub API to retrieve the list of the repositories (gh to be precise). It means that it can handle private and public, old and new repositories as well.
2. It uses the GitHub repository ID as the target directory name. It means that it can handle repository renames and ownership changes gracefully.
3. It can handle multiple GitHub users and organizations, as well as single repositores, in a single run in a given configuration file.

You can use Nix to install gidek or download the statically compiled binary from the releases page. Checkout the gidek repository for more information.

Once installed, you can prepare a configuration file like this:

cat <<EOF > config.yaml
store: /data/gidek/store
token: $(gh auth token)
repos:
  - type: single
    name: vst/gidek
  - type: user
    name: vst
  - type: organization
    name: fourmolu
EOF

…, optionally see the plan that would gidek run:

gidek --config config.yaml plan

…, and run backups:

gidek --config config.yaml backup

Now, you can add this to your crontab or systemd timer to run it periodically.

I am not using Bitbucket, GitLab or other services (at least not actively). Therefore, gidek currently supports only GitHub. But adding support for other services should not be hard.

How About NixOS?

I knew you all would ask for this! Yes, gidek comes with a NixOS module that introduces the gidek service and the gidek program to your system:

{
  #...

  imports = [
    ## I am using niv to pin the gidek version:
    "${sources.gidek}/nix/modules/nixos"
  ];

  services.gidek = {
    enable = true;
    user = "vst";
    schedule = "Sat *-*-* 00:00:01";
  };

  programs.gidek = {
    enable = true;
    config = {
      store = "/data/gidek";
      ## I am using sops-nix to manage my secrets:
      token_file = config.sops.secrets.github_token.path;
      repos = [
        { type = "single"; name = "vst/gidek"; }
        { type = "user"; name = "vst"; }
        { type = "organization"; name = "fourmolu"; }
      ];
  };

  #...
}

✅ Most Important Task of the Day: Promote NixOS however annoying

Conclusion

I and my company are using gidek to backup our GitHub repositories. It gave me some peace of mind. I hope it will give you some, too.