Clone all the forks of a repository, or all the repos of a GitHub Classroom assignment.

This is useful for collecting and reviewing assignments and student projects.

Features:

• Written in Golang for easier distribution. (I got tired juggling of juggling Anaconda / virtualenv between various classroom and tool environments.)
• Automatic repo discovery. Knows about “students fork” and “GitHub Classroom” conventions.
• Repos are cloned in parallel.
• Create a myrepos .mrconfig file.

multiclone is written in Go with support for multiple platforms. The latest release can be found at the releases page.

Homebrew can be used to install multiclone on macOS:

$ brew tap osteele/homebrew-tap
$ brew install multiclone

Create a GitHub personal access token for the command line

Set GITHUB_TOKEN to this value: export GITHUB_TOKEN=…

multiclone https://github.com/owner/repo
multiclone owner/repo

Clone forks of owner/repo into the current directory.

multiclone repos.txt

Clones the repo

repos.txt is a file with one repo name-with-owner, e.g. osteele/homework1, per line.

multiclone https://github.com/owner/repo --classroom
multiclone org/repo --classroom

Clone org's repos named repo-* into the current directory.

This is intended for use with repos created via GitHub Classroom.

multiclone --dir path/to/dir owner/repo

Clone into subdirectories of path/to/dir, instead of the current directory.

multiclone owner/repo --dry-run

See the git commands that would be run, without actually running them.

multiclone --help

Lists additional options.

1. Install go (1) via Homebrew: brew install go; or (2) download.
2. go install github.com/osteele/multiclone

These GitHub Education Community forum threads discuss a variety of alternatives (including one I wrote before I wrote this):

• GitHub Classroom: clone assignments
• How to automatically gather or collect assignments?

myrepos automates parallel management of a set of repos. It doesn't create the initial repo set, which is that this tool does.

MIT