Backup (clone) all your own gists

You need to have a personal access token to GitHub. In this script I use my token saved in ~/.github_access_token.

Also you need to have the git utility on your system.

Install PyGithub package to work with GitHub API

pip install PyGithub

The gist is actually a git repository. All your gists you can clone as regular repositories into a directory called repos. Script clones gists with names contained the IDs. Also script creates index.json which contains an array of objects describing what you got.

#!/usr/bin/env python -B

# pip install PyGithub
from github import Github
import pathlib
import json
import os


gists = []

g = Github(open(pathlib.Path.home() / ".github_access_token").read())

for gist in g.get_user().get_gists():
    gists.append({
        "id": gist.id,
        "description": gist.description,
        "public": gist.public,
        "clone": gist.git_pull_url,
        "updated": gist.updated_at.isoformat(),
        "url": gist.url,
    })

    os.system("git clone {0} repos/{1}".format(gist.git_pull_url, gist.id))

with open("index.json", "w") as f:
    f.write(json.dumps(gists, indent=4) + "\n")