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     # comma-separated list
  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.)