Delete all of your GitHub gists w/ Python

README.md

Delete all of your GitHub gists

1. Ensure Python3.x and the requests library is installed.
2. Create a personal access token and give it the gists permission.
3. Store the access token in the GITHUB_TOKEN environment value
4. Run the script

python3 delete-gists.py

Alternatively you can combine step 2 and 3 in a single line:

GITHUB_TOKEN=<your-access-token-here> python3 delete-gists.py

This will delete all of your gists one by one, fetching 200 at a time. If you have more than 200 gists then you will need to run the script more than once to delete all of them.

delete-gists.py

import requests
import os 

token = os.environ.get('GITHUB_TOKEN', '')
if token == '':
    print("Please set the GITHUB_TOKEN environment variable before running")
    exit()

headers = {
    'Accepts': 'application/vnd.github+json',
    'Authorization': f'Bearer {token}',
    'X-GitHub-Api-Version': '2022-11-28'
}

print('Retrieving gists...')
gists = requests.get('https://api.github.com/gists?page=1&per_page=200', headers=headers).json()
choice = input('{} gists found... Do you want to delete them all? Y/[n]: '.format(len(gists)))      
if choice != 'Y':
  quit()

print('Deleting gists...')

i = 0
for g in gists:
  i = i + 1
  print('Deleting gist {} ID: {} ...'.format(i, g['id']) )
  response = requests.delete('https://api.github.com/gists/{}'.format(g['id']),headers=headers)
  if response.status_code == 204:
    print('OK')
  else:
    print('Error...')