Automatic GitHub Mirroring for Self-Hosted Repositories

jacob@jacobedwards.org (Jacob Edwards) — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 18:58:00 -0500

While there are many benefits to self-hosting git repositories, there are a number of reasons to mirror them to GitHub: Redundancy, discoverability, integration with other users, etc. It’s actually very easy to set up automatic GitHub repository creation and mirroring using the GitHub CLI and simple git hooks. The process is explained below.

Generating a GitHub Personal Access Token

The first step is to go to “Developer Settings” in settings, then generate a fine-grained personal access token with read/write access to “Administration”. This token will be used to create and update repositories.

Packaging Software for OpenBSD

jacob@jacobedwards.org (Jacob Edwards) — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 22:09:45 -0600

I’m in the process of creating an Ansible playbook for configuring and maintaining all the infrastructure hosted on my server. The main benefits of using Ansible for my use-case instead of just running commands directly is that it allows for modular, self-documenting modules and it’s easy to use with version control. There are a lot of programs required by the server (stagit-hook, gitman, autocert, etc.) that aren’t officially packaged by OpenBSD, so that leads to two choices: Either automate the build and install in Ansible (effectively writing package manager in Ansible), or package the projects for OpenBSD and install them normally. While either solution would work, the latter makes use of existing systems instead of introducing new ones and is less error-prone.

Reference on Jacob Edwards

Automatic GitHub Mirroring for Self-Hosted Repositories

Generating a GitHub Personal Access Token

Packaging Software for OpenBSD