gists-gone

gists-gone is a command-line tool that gives you more granular control over bulk deletion of your Github gists.

For example, if you want to only delete your public Python gists:

gists-gone -l Python -v public

Getting started

Prerequisites

In order to use this tool you'll need a Github access token with the "Gists" user permissions (write).

Once you have this token you can pass it to the tool directly:

gists-gone --token ghp_abc123

... or you can create an environmental variable called GITHUB_API_TOKEN, the value of which is your access token.

Installation

pip install gists-gone

Usage

Deleting everything

To delete all your gists simply run the tool with no arguments:

gists-gone

You will get a warning message before proceeding (which can be overriden with the --force option, although I caution against this):

Are you sure you proceed with the deletion?
10 gists will be deleted.
[Y/n]

Filtering

gists-gone have 3 different options, all of which can be combined for specifying the type of gists to included in the deletion.

Languages

You can specify gists in particular languages you want deleted:

gists-gone --languages SQL Python

Note that the name of the languages is case-sensitive.

For gists you want deleted that that have no language (or Github doesn't recognise) you can specify Unknown:

gists-gone -l Unknown

Visbility

Using the -visibility option you can specify whether you want to delete public or secret gists:

gists-gone -v secret
gists-gone -v public

Date range

With the --date_range option you can specify to delete gists created on a particular date:

gists-gone -dr 2024-04-01

Or between two dates:

gists-gone -dr 2018-04-01 2024-01-01

Dates should be passed in YYYY-MM-DD format.

Examples

Deleting secret gists created from 2020-01-01 onwards:

gists-gone -v secret -dr 2020-01-01 2100-01-01

Deleting Rust gists created on a particular date:

gists-gone -l Rust -dr 2024-11-07

Limitations

Note that a maximum of 3000 gists can be retrieved by the tool at any one time, due to a limitation imposed by the API.

However you can simply rerun the tool after you've deleted some gists or if you're feeling fancy you can invoke the command multiple times with a loop:

for i in {1..5}
do
  gists-gone --force # Be careful with this option!
done

The Github API also has a personal rate limit of 5,000 requests per hour so bear in mind you'll have to wait an hour if you want to delete more than 3000 gists.

Roadmap

I would like to eventually add more options for specifying the types of gists to be deleted:

• Filtering a gist's description using regex
• Starred or unstarred
• Updated date

Warning

I've done my best to unit test this tool as thoroughly as possible but as there is no way to retrieve a gist once it's deleted I caution you to not use this tool if you have any particularly important or sensitive gists that you do not want accidentally deleted.

I do not take responsibility for any unintended outcomes or damages.

That said, if you do notice anything wrong please raise an issue!