🛠️ How I Made My Old Public GitHub Repos Private (All at Once)

So recently, I was cleaning up my GitHub profile — and I realised I had so many random public repos 😅
Some were test projects, some half-done college stuff, and a few experiments I never even finished.

I didn’t want people to see all that junk, but GitHub doesn’t let us make multiple repos private at once using the normal UI.
So I found a simple solution using GitHub CLI. Here’s what I did 👇

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✅ Step 1: Install GitHub CLI

I installed GitHub CLI using this command in CMD:

winget install GitHub.cli

If you’re using Linux or Mac, you can check the install guide here: https://cli.github.com/manual/installation

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✅ Step 2: Login to GitHub from CLI

After installation, I logged in using:

gh auth login

It asked some questions:

• I selected GitHub.com

• Then chose HTTPS

• Then opened browser and signed in — done.

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✅ Step 3: Make a List of Repos

Now I made a list of repos I wanted to make private.

Just the repo names — not the full URL.

For example:

repos=(
  test-app
  mini-project
  random-api
)

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✅ Step 4: Create Script to Make Repos Private

I created a file called make-private.sh and added this code:

#!/bin/bash

repos=(
  repo1
  repo2
  repo3
)

username="your_github_username"

for repo in "${repos[@]}"
do
  echo "Making $repo private..."
  gh repo edit "$username/$repo" --visibility private --accept-visibility-change-consequences
done

Replace:

• repo1, repo2, etc. with your actual repo names

• your_github_username with your real GitHub username

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✅ Step 5: Run the Script in Git Bash

Since I’m on Windows, I opened Git Bash (comes with Git) and ran:

chmod +x make-private.sh
./make-private.sh

That’s it! All my selected repos became private. 🫡

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👨‍💻 Bonus Tip: See All Your Public Repos

If you want to list your current public repos, you can run:

gh repo list yourusername --visibility public

Copy the names from here and paste them into your script.

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💭 Final Thoughts

This small trick helped me clean up my profile fast. Now only my good projects are public — the rest are hidden from the world 😎

If you're a developer or student like me who has experimented a lot on GitHub, give this method a try. Simple and effective.

Let me know if it worked for you too!

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• 🌐 Portfolio: amanraj.me

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• 🐦 Twitter/X: [x.com/huamanraj]

Thanks for reading! 🙌