Detect (and remove) bot commits

detect-bots scans a repository's git history for commits authored by bots (Dependabot, Renovate, GitHub Actions, Copilot, Claude, …) and can optionally rewrite history to remove them.

# Scan the current repository
bun run github detect-bots

# Scan a remote repo (cloned into a temp dir)
bun run github detect-bots --repo owner/repo --local=false

# Machine-readable output
bun run github detect-bots --format json

Flags

Flag	Default	Description
--repo	—	GitHub repo (owner/repo) to clone and scan
--local	true	Scan the local repository (set false to clone --repo)
--dry-run	off	Show what would be done without doing it
--purge-bots	off	Remove bot commits from git history
--format	text	Output format (text or json)

What counts as a bot

Detection matches author name/email against a built-in pattern list: dependabot, renovate, github-actions, greenkeeper, snyk-bot, imgbot, codecov, netlify, vercel, semantic-release-bot, release-please, copilot, claude, anthropic, and the [bot] suffix.

The output reports the matched commits, the total commit count, and the percentage of history attributed to bots.

Removing bot commits

# Preview the rewrite first
bun run github detect-bots --purge-bots --dry-run

# Then rewrite history
bun run github detect-bots --purge-bots

History rewrite

--purge-bots rewrites git history, which changes commit SHAs and requires a force-push (git push --force-with-lease). Prefer running it against a fresh clone (--repo owner/repo --local=false). For normalizing human author identities (rather than removing bots), see clean-authors.