A Python program to back up all repos in a GitHub account

The goal: Automatically find all repos in a specified GitHub account and back them up to folders on the local hard disk.

I've seen instructions for backing up GitHub using Ruby (such as this example) or a shell script (like this one), but I wanted to use Python, which was already installed on my computer.

My environment:

• Windows 7
• Python 3.3.0

Here's the Python code, gitback.py:

import json
import os
import sys
import urllib.request
import zipfile

def main():
 # Change this to your own GitHub username.
 user = 'xxxxx'

 # The repos will be backed up to the directory you
 # specify as a command-line argument.Example: gitback.py c:\gitbkup
 target = sys.argv[1]

 # Delete the target directory if it exists. Then create it.
 if (target != None and target != '' and os.path.exists(target)):
  os.system('rd /S /Q ' + target)
 os.makedirs(target)

 # Get up to 100 repos. If your account has more than 100 repos,
 # increase the per_page value.
 req = urllib.request.Request('https://api.github.com/users/' + user + '/repos?per_page=100')
 resp = urllib.request.urlopen(req)

 # The result is in byte format, so we need to specify
 # the encoding and decode it.
 content = resp.read().decode('utf-8')

 # The result is in JSON format. Parse the JSON.
 data = json.loads(content)

 # Loop over all the repos, cloning each one.
 for repo in data:
  name = repo['name']
  os.system('git clone git@github.com:' + user + '/' + name + ' ' + target + "\\" + name)

if __name__ == '__main__':
 main()