Grouping repos on GitHub? [duplicate]

Problem

This question already has answers here:

Can I arrange repositories into folders on Github? (8 answers)

Closed 4 years ago.

Here's the situation: I'm migrating a bunch of repos to github. The repos are currently organized into groups/directories like 'stack', 'websites', 'applications', etc.

There's no way (I've found) to create groups or folders on GitHub for repos, except with organizations, which seems a poor choice. But maybe not? The problem here is that some of the groups are very small, while others are large... with sub-groups, and I'd like to keep all the projects in one root bucket.

So, I'm left with maybe using a naming convention. Like: 'stack-apache', 'website-foo.com', 'application-some-project'. Or just giving up on organizing them in github and let the project pages / website handle the organization.

Re. scale, I'm looking at 20+ repos initially, with new repos added over time at an estimated rate of 2-5 /year for the next few years.

Anyone have experience with this kind of thing?

Solution and Answer

Update 2023

Github added the lists-feature (still in beta). If you star a repository you can add it to an existing list or create a new one. Still not a very intuitive way to group your own repositories but it works.

Update 2020

I'm not sure exactly when, but Github has (somewhat recently) added the concept of projects, which kind of fill the missing gap. I would argue they aren't quite the same as Bitbucket Projects but they are better suited to grouping related repo's in Github than Orgs

---

Original answer

Organisations in my opinion fit a different purpose in Github than grouping repos (although they do serve to group repos). Organisations are more about fine grained control around repo access (thats my understanding).

Bitbucket has introduced the concept of "Projects", with the following hierarchy (with a comparison to Github):

Bitbucket: Team         -> has N -> Projects -> has N -> Repos
Github:    Organisation -> has N                      -> Repos

Bitbucket still allows Repos to not be assigned to an team or project, I am guessing to support older repos that existed before the concept of a project.

To answer the question, no, not directly. There are outstanding requests with Github to add groups, but it doesn't seem likely (at this point in time).

Prefixing works as a so-so solution:

Repo name: [project]__[repo name]

Lets say you have a client "acme" with two repos:

Eg: acme__api Eg: acme__landing

Github's search is quick and inline, so doing a search for acme__ in your repo list will list all repos for the acme__ project.