Background

I use mirror-to-gitea to backup my personal GitHub repositories onto a private Forgejo instance.

mirror-to-gitea expects a GitHub access token in case you want to mirror private repositories. I use a fine-grained personal access token to only allow read access to my repositories.

This works very well for my use case.

Problem

tl;dr: I'm lazy.

By default, GitHub PATs have an expiration date. It is possible to disable the expiration, but depending on your risk aversion you might not want to do that.

A few days ago my token expired, which led to errors when Forgejo tried to update the mirrored repositories. This meant that I had to update the mirroring configuration through the GUI in every single private repository on my Forgejo instance.

Solution

Gitea/Forgejo store the auth token inside the config file of each Git repository. This allows us to use a combination of CLI tools to update all of the tokens in bulk:

grep -rl 'YOUR_OLD_TOKEN' $FORGEJO_VOLUME | xargs sed -i 's/YOUR_OLD_TOKEN/YOUR_NEW_TOKEN/g'

Tips

Use a leading space when copying the command into your terminal to prevent your token from leaking into your .bash_history. This requires setting $HISTCONTROL to either ignoredups or ignoreboth (Bash).