How do you decommission a GitHub project?

Question

An organization I work with has a project on GitHub that no one outside the organization has used and we are end-of-lifeing it.

I see there is a great big delete button, but I wonder if there is a way to freeze the project so it can never be pushed to again, and write "decommissioned" on it in some way that will be universally recognized by other programmers.

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 07 '15 at 21:47

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First off, simply add an explanatory note at the beginning of the README.md file in the repo (and if that file doesn't exist yet, add it). Say something like "This project has reached its end of life, and is now just preserved here for posterity."

The non-enterprise flavor of GitHub doesn't let you disable push, unfortunately.

answered Aug 07 '15 at 21:47

simmer

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With markdown to highlight a great big "End-of-life" heading at the top of the README.md file, we now have a great big banner on the page saying END-OF-LIFE. Looks great. Thanks. – k-den Aug 10 '15 at 16:12

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 08 '15 at 08:54

In addition of a README, you can make sure the number of people able to push back to the project is minimal (ideally one, the owner, and 0 contributors)

That way, nobody is able to push back to the repo, and any new fork would include the README announcing the eol.

How do you decommission a GitHub project?

2 Answers2