How to unstar all your github starred repos

unstar-all-repos.md

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How to unstar all your github stars with API

Generate a github personal token

visit here: https://github.com/settings/tokens make sure to check repo scope, it is needed to unstar

Get all starred repos

set apikey as env variable

export APIKEY=xxxxxxxxx

first get total number of pages of your star

curl -I -H "Authorization: token $APIKEY" https://api.github.com/user/starred
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
...
Link: <https://api.github.com/user/starred?page=2>; rel="next", <https://api.github.com/user/starred?page=4>; rel="last"
...

then iterate on all pages (1 to 4)

for p in `seq 1 4`;do
echo page 
curl -s -H "Authorization: token $APIKEY" https://api.github.com/user/starred\?page\=$p | jq -r '.[] |.full_name' >>stars.txt
done

finally delete all repos in the stars.txt file

while read REPO;do
echo 
curl -X DELETE -s -H "Authorization: token $APIKEY" "https://api.github.com/user/starred/$REPO"
sleep 0.5
done<stars.txt

should curl -X DELETE -s -H "Authorization: token $APIKEY" https://api.github.com/user/starred/ be curl -X DELETE -s -H "Authorization: token $APIKEY" https://api.github.com/user/starred/$REPO? (missing $REPO here)

should curl -X DELETE -s -H "Authorization: token $APIKEY" https://api.github.com/user/starred/ be curl -X DELETE -s -H "Authorization: token $APIKEY" https://api.github.com/user/starred/$REPO? (missing $REPO here)

you are right, thank you.

while read REPO;do
echo 
curl -X DELETE -s -H "Authorization: token $APIKEY" https://api.github.com/user/starred/$REPO
sleep .5
done<stars.txt

I couldn't run part of this code (I use Windows OS). The reasoning is that right after creating stars.txt, there is a carriage return at the end of each line there was a \r which messed up the deletion process.

I fixed my issue by Find and Replace All \r into \n in Notepad3 (Sublime Text did not detect any \r). The code is perfect, thank you very much.

Thanks. 🚀

#!/usr/bin/env bash

set -o errexit
set -o pipefail
set -o nounset

STARS_PAGE_COUNT=20
STARS_FILE=stars.txt
DELETE_SLEEP_TIME=.5

function get_all_star_repos() {
  for p in $(seq 1 $STARS_PAGE_COUNT);do
    echo "page: $p"
    curl -s -H "Authorization: token $APIKEY" https://api.github.com/user/starred\?page\=$p | jq -r '.[] |.full_name' >> $STARS_FILE
  done
}

function remove_all_star_repos() {
  while read REPO;do
    echo "REPO: $REPO"
    curl -X DELETE -s -H "Authorization: token $APIKEY" https://api.github.com/user/starred/$REPO
    sleep $DELETE_SLEEP_TIME
  done < $STARS_FILE
}

get_all_star_repos
remove_all_star_repos

while read REPO;do
echo 
curl -X DELETE -s -H "Authorization: token $APIKEY" https://api.github.com/user/starred/$REPO
sleep .5
done<stars.txt

I couldn't run part of this code (I use Windows OS). The reasoning is that right after creating stars.txt, there is a carriage return at the end of each line there was a \r which messed up the deletion process.

I fixed my issue by Find and Replace All \r into \n in Notepad3 (Sublime Text did not detect any \r). The code is perfect, thank you very much.

The above solution is no longer suitable for the latest Github API (2022-11-28). This is my solution.

while read REPO;do
curl -L -X DELETE -H "Accept: application/vnd.github+json" -H "Authorization: Bearer $APIKEY" -H "X-GitHub-Api-Version: 2022-11-28" https://api.github.com/user/starred/$REPO
done < stars.txt