jiayaoqijia GitHub Multi-Repo Manager
Manage GitHub operations across multiple repositories from a single workspace. While every other GitHub skill focuses on single-repo operations, this skill orchestrates work across an entire organization or user account -- project boards spanning repos, team workload analysis, milestone tracking, PR review pipelines, and release coordination.
Quick Start
Initialize a workspace:
Set up multi-repo management for the "my-org" GitHub organization
Cross-repo search:
Find all open bugs across every repo in my-org
Team workload:
Who on the team is overloaded with issues and pending reviews?
Project board management:
Show the status of all items on project board #2, grouped by repo
Capabilities
| Capability | What It Does | API Used | Reference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Workspace Init | Detect org/user, discover projects, cache config | GraphQL + REST | patterns/workspace-init.md |
| Repo Discovery | Catalog repos by language, activity, staleness | REST | references/repo-discovery.md |
| Cross-Repo Search | Unified issue/PR search with rich filters | Search API | references/cross-repo-search.md |
| Project Boards | Projects v2 items, fields, status across repos | GraphQL | references/project-boards.md |
| Team Analytics | Per-member workload, bottleneck detection | Search + REST | references/team-analytics.md |
| Milestone Tracking | Cross-repo milestone progress, overdue detection | REST | references/milestone-tracking.md |
| PR Pipeline | Review status, stale PRs, merge readiness | REST + CLI | references/pr-pipeline.md |
| Release Coordination | Unreleased commits, draft releases, cadence | REST | references/release-coordination.md |
Prerequisites
| Tool | Required | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
gh |
Yes | GitHub CLI - all API access |
jq |
Yes | JSON processing and filtering |
yq |
Recommended | YAML config parsing (Python fallback available) |
Required gh auth scopes: repo, read:org, project, read:project
# Verify tools
gh --version && jq --version && yq --version
# Check auth scopes
gh auth status
# Add missing scopes if needed
gh auth refresh --scopes 'repo,read:org,project,read:project'
Execution Patterns
This skill uses three foundational patterns that all capabilities build on:
| Pattern | Purpose | Key Technique |
|---|---|---|
| Workspace Init | Multi-repo workspace setup | Walk-up config detection, org/user type detection |
| GraphQL Execution | Safe GraphQL queries | Temp file HEREDOC to avoid $variable expansion |
| Config Caching | Cache-first ID resolution | Local YAML cache with staleness tracking |
Security Model
- No credentials stored - all auth via
ghCLI token - Read-only by default - write operations (project updates) are explicitly marked
- Rate limit aware - Search API: 30 req/min, REST: 5,000 req/hr
- Config is not sensitive - contains only entity IDs, not tokens
- Scope verification - checks required scopes before operations
Composability
This skill composes well with other skills:
- Code review skills can use PR pipeline data to prioritize reviews
- CI/CD skills can use release coordination to trigger deployments
- Documentation skills can use milestone data for changelog generation
- Security audit skills can use repo discovery for org-wide scanning
Example Prompts
- "Initialize workspace for the my-org organization"
- "List all repos in my-org grouped by language"
- "Find all open issues labeled 'critical' across all repos"
- "Show project board #2 items grouped by status and repo"
- "Add issue #15 from api-server to project board #2"
- "Who has the most pending reviews right now?"
- "Show milestone 'v2.0' progress across all repos"
- "Which PRs have been open for more than 2 weeks without review?"
- "Which repos have unreleased commits since their last release?"
- "Show the release cadence for each repo over the last 6 months"