Bulk delete github repos

README.md

Use this trick to bulk delete your old repos or old forks

(Inspired by https://medium.com/@icanhazedit/clean-up-unused-github-rpositories-c2549294ee45#.3hwv4nxv5)

1. Open in a new tab all to-be-deleted github repositores (Use the mouse’s middle click or Ctrl + Click) https://github.com/username?tab=repositories

2. Use one tab https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/onetab/chphlpgkkbolifaimnlloiipkdnihall to shorten them to a list.

3. Save that list to some path

4. The list should be in the form of “ur_username\repo_name” per line. Use regex search (Sublime text could help). Search for ' |.*' and replace by empty.

5. Register a new personal access token with a 'delete_repo perm' https://github.com/settings/tokens/new

6. Copy the access_token and run the following line replacing xxx with your access token.

Linux and OS X :

while read r;do curl -XDELETE -H 'Authorization: token xxx' "https://api.github.com/repos/$r ";done < repos

Windows:

get-content D:\repolist.txt | ForEach-Object { Invoke-WebRequest -Uri https://api.github.com/repos/$_ -Method “DELETE” -Headers @{"Authorization"="token xxx"} }

Caution

I have only tested this script on Linux.

Have fun :)

For deleting organization team repos

1. Generate a personal access token with 'delete_repo' permission: https://github.com/settings/tokens/new
2. Open the teams repositories view and run following in the browsers console

let repos = ''
const el = document.querySelectorAll('#org-team-repositories > ul > li > div:nth-child(1) > div > div:nth-child(2) > a > span').forEach(e => {repos = repos + `"${e.innerText}"\n`})
console.log(repos)

3. Copy paste the output to @aug2uag shell script and run it (fixed extra space typo in it):

#!/bin/bash

repos=(
	"username/repo1"
	"username/repo2"
	"username/repo3"
)

for i in "${repos[@]}"
do
   : 
   echo 'Delete' "$i";
   curl -XDELETE -H 'Authorization: token XXXX' "https://api.github.com/repos/$i";
done

Best solution, without third-party tools.

This works for me in 2026 for personal repositories (paginated):

let repos = ''
const el = document.querySelectorAll('#user-repositories-list [itemprop~=codeRepository]')
    .forEach(e => {repos = repos + `"${e.innerText}"\n`})
console.log(repos)

Still useful, thanks a lot!