Automatically mirroring a GitHub repo

Question

I suspect this question has been asked before, though all I can find are similar but distinct questions or the same one with only solutions that do not work for me.

There is a repository on GitHub that I have no control over and would like to mirror. With mirror I mean have a clone that gets updated automatically. I want this mirror to also be on GitHub. Preferably any solution would not involve much configuration or setup work from my side. However if needed I can have a script run using a cron on some VPS.

Can I create such a mirror purely via GitHub? If not, are there ready to use scripts to do this?

Answer 1

Interesting question, considering all Eclipse repos are mirrored on GitHub.

But, as illustrated by the recent (April 2013) article from Wayne, the re is no automatic GitHub way to mirror a repo.

As far as I know, GitHub provides no mechanism to schedule a regular pull (correct me if I’m wrong), which means that it would become our responsibility to push to the GitHub clone.

See also bug 402183.

So a script on a VPS (ie, something you setup) remains the surest way to implement this.

Building on "HowTo mirror your git repository on Github", you would need your own local clone, with a script which would:

• regularly pull from the GitHub repo
• push to the mirror on Github

Update 2015 (2 years later): a tool like beefsack/git-mirror (in go) is:

designed to create and serve read-only mirrors of your Git repositories locally or wherever you choose.
A recent GitHub outage reinforces the fact that developers shouldn't be relying on a single remote for hosting code.