auto-fork-action

A GitHub Action that automatically forks a repository into your organization, creates a maintainers team, assigns specified users and grants permissions.

Simplify onboarding of forked repos and team setup for your organization.

Features

• 🔧 Automatically fork any public repository into your org
• 🏷️ Optionally specify a custom name for the forked repository
• 👥 Bootstrap a maintainers team and assign roles
• 🔒 Grant fine-grained permissions (pull│push│maintain)
• 📦 Reusable action with configurable inputs

Getting Started

Usage

# in your workflow file
uses: InditexTech/auto-fork-action@v1
with:
  repository: owner/repo             # or full URL like https://github.com/owner/repo
  maintainers: alice,bob,charlie     # GitHub usernames, separated by commas (e.g. octocat, habert). Make sure they are valid. Users who are not on the list will be deleted and those who are will be kept or added.
  token: ${{ secrets.ORG_PAT }}      # PAT with repo + admin:org
  org: InditexTech                   # optional, defaults to the workflow repo owner
  custom-name: custom-repo-name      # optional, custom name for the forked repository
  team-name: custom-maintainers      # optional, defaults to <repo>-maintainers
  permission: maintain               # optional: pull | triage | push | maintain | admin (default: maintain)
  poll-interval: '5'                 # optional, seconds between fork-ready checks (default: 3)
  poll-retries: '15'                 # optional, number of retries before timing out (default: 10)

Example workflow

name: auto-fork action

on:
  workflow_dispatch:
  issues:
    types: [opened]

jobs:
  fork-and-team:
    if: ${{ contains(github.event.issue.labels.*.name, 'auto-fork') }}
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          sparse-checkout: |
            .github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE/fork-request.yml
          sparse-checkout-cone-mode: false

      - uses: stefanbuck/github-issue-parser@v3
        id: issue-parser
        with:
          template-path: .github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE/fork-request.yml

      - uses: InditexTech/auto-fork-action@v1
        id: auto-fork
        with:
          repository: ${{ steps.issue-parser.outputs.issueparser_repo_url }}
          maintainers: ${{ steps.issue-parser.outputs.issueparser_maintainers }}
          token: ${{ secrets.YOUR_TOKEN }}

      - run: gh issue close --comment "$BODY" "$NUMBER"
        env:
          GH_TOKEN: ${{ steps.generate-token.outputs.token }}
          GH_REPO: ${{ github.repository }}
          NUMBER: ${{ github.event.issue.number }}
          BODY: >
            Repository has been forked: [${{ steps.auto-fork.outputs.fork-repo }}](${{ steps.auto-fork.outputs.fork-url
            }}).

This example workflow assumes you have a issue template similar to the following:

name: Fork + team request
description: fork a repo, create team and assign maintainers
title: Fork repository request
labels: [auto-fork]
body:
  - type: input
    id: repo_url
    attributes:
      label: GitHub repo to fork
      description: full URL, e.g. https://github.com/foo/bar
    validations:
      required: true

  - type: textarea
    id: maintainers
    attributes:
      label: Maintainer usernames
      description: comma-separated, e.g. alice, bob, charlie
    validations:
      required: true

Contributing

We welcome contributions!

Please read our CONTRIBUTING.md and follow the Code of Conduct.

Roadmap

While this first release provides the core functionality, future iterations may include:

• 🐛 Bugfixes and reliability improvements
• 🧪 Enhanced error handling and logging
• 🔄 Support for updating existing teams and repos

Have an idea or use case? Open an issue!

Acknowledgments

• Based on the TypeScript Action template.
• Thanks to the GitHub Actions Toolkit for providing libraries and examples.

License

This project is licensed under the Apache-2.0 License.

© 2025 INDUSTRIA DE DISEÑO TEXTIL S.A. (INDITEX S.A.)