Purge All Repos — Maintenance Orchestrator

Automatically triggers the maintenance.yml workflow (deployments + workflow runs + caches purge) across all your public and private repositories on a schedule. Safely defaults to dry-run: true so you can preview before actual deletion.

How it works

1. Discovers all your repositories (public + private)
2. Filters by optional pattern
3. Checks each repo has maintenance.yml
4. Triggers maintenance.yml via workflow_dispatch with configurable inputs
5. Runs up to 3 repos in parallel to avoid rate limits

Usage

Automatic (weekly schedule)

Runs every Sunday at 03:00 UTC by default:

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: '0 3 * * 0'  # Every Sunday at 03:00 UTC

Manual trigger

Go to Actions → Purge All Repos — Maintenance Orchestrator → Run workflow and set:

• keep — number of deployments/runs/caches to retain (default: 10)
• dry-run — preview before deleting (default: true — safe!)
• filter-repo — optional pattern to target specific repos (e.g. my-org/foo-*)

Inputs

Input	Type	Default	Description
keep	number	10	Number of most-recent items to keep per repo (deployments/runs/caches)
dry-run	boolean	true	Preview what would be deleted without deleting (safe default)
filter-repo	string	''	Filter repos by name pattern (e.g. my-org/foo-*). Empty = all repos

Permissions

Requires a Personal Access Token (PAT) with:

• repo scope (access to public and private repos)
• workflow scope (ability to trigger workflows)

Set as repository secret PURGE_PAT and use in the caller (see below), or use github.token (default) if running in a repo you own with sufficient token permissions.

Integration with caller workflows

To trigger this from another repo or organization-level automation:

name: Weekly purge
on:
  schedule:
    - cron: '0 3 * * 0'
jobs:
  purge-all:
    uses: KevinDeBenedetti/github-workflows/.github/workflows/purge-all-repos.yml@main
    secrets:
      token: ${{ secrets.PURGE_PAT }}  # Optional: use custom PAT instead of github.token
    with:
      keep: 10
      dry-run: true

How to adopt

Each repo must have .github/workflows/maintenance.yml present. Copy from examples/maintenance.yml:

# In each of your repos:
mkdir -p .github/workflows
cp examples/maintenance.yml .github/workflows/
git add .github/workflows/maintenance.yml
git commit -m "chore: add maintenance workflow"
git push

Or use GitHub's repository template feature to sync it automatically to all new repos.

Workflow behavior

1. Discovery phase — lists all repos, optionally filters by pattern
2. Dispatch phase — triggers maintenance.yml on each repo with inputs, runs 3 repos in parallel
3. Non-blocking — if a repo fails or doesn't have maintenance.yml, the orchestrator continues (uses continue-on-error)
4. Summary — reports that workflows were triggered; check individual repo Actions tabs for detailed results

Best practices

• Start with dry-run — first execution should have dry-run: true to preview what each repo would delete
• Review before deletion — check the job summaries in each repo's Actions tab to confirm safe deletions
• Stagger large organizations — if you have 100+ repos, increase max-parallel gradually or run filters
• Backup critical deployments — ensure you have external deployment records before auto-purging

Troubleshooting

• "No maintenance.yml found" — that repo doesn't have the maintenance workflow yet; add it via examples/maintenance.yml
• Rate limit errors — GitHub API limits 3 concurrent workflow triggers per repo; the orchestrator respects this
• Token permissions — ensure your PAT has repo + workflow scopes

Notes

• This orchestrator workflow lives in the central github-workflows repo
• Each target repo must have its own maintenance.yml for this to work
• Dry-run defaults to true for safety — uncheck only after reviewing what would be deleted