Automatically Pulling Multiple Repos From GitHub on Mac

12 Jan 2025 | ~3 minute read

I have a number of GitHub repositories on my Mac and I wanted a way to auto-pull them on a regular basis. Here's how I did it.

Any regular readers of my waffle will know that I'm not the sharpest tool in the box. Git is a core part of my workflow for a number of my projects, but being the sausage that I am, I often forget to pull the latest changes from GitHub before doing some work locally. Git then inevitably gets itself confused and it becomes a whole thing to resolve the conflict(s).

So I needed a way to bypass my sausageness, by automatically pulling from all my repositories on a regular basis. I ended up doing this in 2 steps:

1. Creating a way to pull from all repos in one go
2. Automating that pull

Pulling from GitHub

My first instinct was to build a shell script, then run that script regularly with a cron. All very simple, and something like this would have worked:

#!/bin/sh

cd ~/GitHub/

cd 100daystooffload.com/
git pull
cd ..

cd 512kb.club/
git pull
cd ..

cd kevquirk.com/
git pull
cd ..

You get the idea. The problem with this solution is that I would need to update the script every time I added or removed a repository.

I'm too lazy for that shit, so I hit up Kagi to see if I there was a better option out there.

There was.

find ./GitHub -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d -print -exec git -C {} pull \;

Honestly, I don't really understand what this command is doing in its entirety, but from what I can gather, it's looking in my ./GitHub folder (which is where all my repos live), then going a maximum of 1 folder level deep, and doing a git pull.

It's not perfect, as it tries to pull from every folder within ./GitHub, some of which aren't git repositories. But that's fine, it just skips over them.

While I was there, I went ahead and added an alias to my .zshrc file so I can run the command quickly on demand:

nano .zshrc

alias pullall="find ./GitHub -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d -print -exec git -C {} pull \;"

Now when I run the pullall command from my terminal window, my Mac will pull everything. Nice.

Automating things

Ok, so now that I've solved the pulling issue, I want to automate it. I could have gone with Mac Automator, but to be honest, that thing confuses the shit out of me. Instead, I went with good old crontab.

So I opened up my terminal and entered crontab -e only to be faced with a Vim window. Yeah, screw that; I'm a Nano guy. So first I had to fix that.

Another quick Kagi search later, I added this to my .zshrc file to force Nano as my default editor in terminal:

# Set default file editor to nano
export EDITOR=nano
export VISUAL="$EDITOR"

I restarted my terminal window (so .zshrc was reloaded) and tried crontab -e again. Huzzah! It loaded in Nano and I added a cronjob for my pull command that runs every 2 mins:

# Pulls git repos every 2 mins
*/2 * * * * find ./GitHub -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d -print -exec git -C {} pull \;

Testing it worked

Final thing to do was to make a change on the live website, push it, and wait. A minute or so later the changes silently appeared in my local repo, so everything is working as expected. Niiiiice.

So there you go, a quick guide on how to automate pulling multiple Git repositories on a Mac. All very basic and easy to find online, but thought I'd combine it into a single post, more for my use that anything else.

• Technology

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