Create groups of repositories

[jackrdye]

New feature - group repositories (categories)

Currently I have many repos. Some are projects from university others personal, and some more serious.

I would like to be able to group my repositories

I.e. create a group where I can put all my demo projects in

I feel like the list of repositories is quite cluttered and could use some more organisation. I only have 9 repos at the moment but I can easily see this just getting more chaotic as time goes on.

If you could make this a feature that would be awesome.
Thanks :)))

[jdevfullstack]

well as for now, we have Orgs that you can use to group your projects, you can have an Org without members, it's just to organize your repos plus you have different domains that you can use for your custom domains without conflict with your personal account

https://docs.github.com/en/organizations/collaborating-with-groups-in-organizations/creating-a-new-organization-from-scratch

[drLis]

Not sure, that it's a optimal solution. Can I create sub-orgs and sub-sub-orgs like groups in Gitlab? It takes me for big difficult projects, which for example contains groups of repos like SDK-repos, template-repos and other.

[dipakparmar]

• If you're on the paid plan then you will have to pay for all the other orgs you create. It all comes with additional maintenance. I think some sort of Project structure would be nice. Currently, there is a teams feature in Github, which solves some of its needs.

[EdWordy]

I think this "category" feature would be ideal, especially for solo developers or for freelancers who don't wish to create an organization (as suggested by @jdevstatic).

Otherwise the repo section of a users profile is little more than an ordered list, rather than say, something like a more complex hierarchy represented as a timeline or chronology of work history/overview of projects undertaken i.e. a format that acknowledges how messy, or clean, development can be (at opposite extremes).

[miguel-rodriguez-cimino]

This is such a simple feature I cannot imagine why it doesn't exists in the first place. Organizations are nice, but as other people mentions they don't have a hierarchy. Plus, they come with a whole bunch of settings and additional stuff that I don't need nor want to care about. For all practical purposes creating an organization it's like having yet another account to manage.
I have to resort to practices like name conventions for my repos so I can keep track of which ones are related.

[GabrielDeNobrega]

It also surprises me that GitHub hasn't implemented a feature like this yet. I'm not even close to being a proficient programmer, but I can imagine that this wouldn't be too difficult to add. There's undoubtedly a substantial number of people who have been requesting this particular feature for years, and it seems that it hasn't been given a high priority.

[petatemarvin26]

Additionally if you were working with Microservice that per service has its own repository and you don't want to messed up by searching and looking for the other services related to the project, especially to those community contributors who has tons of repositories,

and the Organization feature, what if I have multiple organization and each organization has different unrelated group of repositories how would you think it looks like, it will be more messy of course, that is why we proposed Group of Repositories, and it will be very more significant for developers who deals many projects

[JorgeSivil]

This is so basic that I find myself very confused as of why this is not implemented.

If I have a big organization, and have different teams, products, I would like to organize their repos in different groups, and give them access to all those repos in the group, for example.

[4S1ght]

That's actually a perfect point. The ability of grouping repos alone would streamline things a LOT.
I recently started a project that was too big and too messy to build as a monorepo, so I decided to split it into multiple libraries that are just glued together inside the "core" project repository. I had to create an entire organisation for it just to have them grouped, this is ridiculous.

[daviddomkar]

I also came across this limitation. In my company, we use GitLab, where this is a solved problem. I would like something similar in GitHub, I work on a side project where I have lots of different repositories for frontend stuff, microservices, and libraries. I would like to have separate groups for all of these because it is really messy to find what I am looking for just in the list of repos. And yes, I have a GitHub org just for this project. But grouping within the org is what is needed.

[Waterstraal]

In dire need of this as well...

Alternatively instead of a single category, the ability to add one or more labels to a repo would be good too. This way you have a little more flexibility as you can group repos in more than 1 way. Then add a label filter to the overview and we're good to go 👏

[rogerweb]

the ability to add one or more labels to a repo would be good too

GitHub already supports it. They call it "topics".

[Waterstraal]

And the new Lists feature kinda works too. I just would like to have a dropdown or hierarchy on the overview

[Anoesj]

Lists are public, whereas I'd like my repo groups/categories to be private.

[Julynx]

I would love to see this feature added!

[KarlsMaranjs]

This is a long requested feature. Think about this case. I have two different projects inside the same organization. Each project containing multiple microservices. As of now, the only alternative is to create two different organizations. Maybe back in 2007 it was pointless, but now, when the average app has at least two separate repositories it is essential to organize them in the same organization.

[riccardo-bernardini]

Let me add my voice to this thread too. I teach DSP and I want to share with my students demos, libraries and other stuff. Having categories would allow me to create a, say, "Teaching DSP" top level group and then, underneath it, "demos," "libs," and so on.

I decided to use GitLab because it has this feature.

[Krowso]

Use a local gitlab server at the company I work at and its had the ability to organize repos into groups for quite sometime now. So I'm kinda shocked github hasn't added their own version of the feature yet. Would love for it to be a thing.

[kvedula18]

can't believe such a basic feature is to be requested, considering all other tools provide it. bummer !! I'm leaving..

[tzoratto]

As of today, I can see 2 different ways to group repositories:

• using topics, as already mentioned up above
• using teams

Teams are not only groups of people, they can be used to group repositories together and can be nested. Great insights about this in this gist.

I'm curious to know the reasons why it hasn't been mentioned here before, as from my understanding, it seems to be the way to go (instead of using organizations which are not meant to group repositories, as per the official documentation).
I'm also interested in other ways to do so, if anyone knows one.

[Krowso]

I feel like topics are more of a tag/label kinda thing which is useful for filtering and helping with searches. Not actual group containers.

One of the problems with organizations (for me at least) is that it requires me to use an email just to create an org which is then publicly displayed. I'd rather not expose my email or create an extra one just to create an org. Plus, i think a group feature would be more ideal for solo developers.

Also based on the documentation it looks like an org has to be created just to use the team feature. So your statement in the second paragraph about using teams instead of orgs doesnt make sense, unless I'm misunderstanding what you are trying to convey.
https://docs.github.com/en/organizations/organizing-members-into-teams/creating-a-team

[tzoratto]

When I said that organizations shouldn't be used to group repositories together (generally speaking), I meant "multiple organizations". Of course you still have to use one organization, but then use teams inside it to organize repositories in some ways.

I get your point about the topics, but that's more of a technical point of view I'd say. I mean that you did not describe what you can do with actual group containers that you cannot with tags and/or teams.

To be honest, I am a bit confused about all this. Even though, by habit, I was also looking for the group feature when I started using GitHub, I'm still not sure whether having actual repository groups would change the UX in a noticeable way or not compared to the use of tags and teams.

[Krowso]

Gotcha, I understand a little better now what you are getting at.

At least with my experience in my company's gitlab it does provide a nice directory style way of viewing groups and the repositories or subgroups under them. As far as UX goes it's probably nothing special, for me at least it's just a case of what I'm used to.

My big issue is still the email thing, which gitlab groups does not require.

[dersuchmann]

+1

[erfan-ilyas]

+1

[AlexanderXieLR]

+1

[John-Ragland]

+1

[rpl-michael-redstall]

+1

[romainframe]

+1

[nabarunchakma]

+1

[paperkitesystems-admin]

+1

[ugal1silbo]

+1

[frankpengau]

Like others have mentioned, I'm using organisations to try and separate projects by "categories" or "types" but it does get a bit tricky to search and organise.

Currently it's a bit of a logical burden trying to remember all the repos that are related and relevant. Of course, standard naming conventions and tagging/labelling can help. But instead of doom scrolling through multiple repos, would be great to have them collated automatically.

Also a reason that sometimes I might opt for monorepos instead, which is not exactly my preference.

Having a "groups" or "lists" of repos to be searchable by "categories" or "types" would be extremely handy.

For example, you might have micro-frontends, microservices, components, IaC...etc which are all related to a single project. If I was to archive/deprecate a specific sub-system all in one swoop, that's a pretty big win in my opinion.

Happy to get a different perspective though.

Just my two cents! :)

[montyclt]

The problem of using subsystem is that it points to a specific commit and it can't point to the branch to be up to date.

[DoHaiSon]

In my case, I'm using Overleaf to draft Latex manual scripts. So, I wanna sync all overleaf projects to Github repos. However, if I do that, I will have a dozen of new repo (1 project on Overleaf = 1 repo). Thus, It's really good if we can group them into 'ovearleaf group'.

[TheMikeyRoss]

try gists

[Gauleria]

+1

[bavo96]

I'm not sure if any members of GitHub are looking into this desperation.

[TheMikeyRoss]

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[Klapeks]

+1

[TheMikeyRoss]

+1