How to delete all releases and tags in a github repository

Question

I tried the github cli:

gh release list | sed 's/|/ /' | awk '{print $1, $8}' | while read -r line; do gh release delete -y "$line"; done

as described here: https://dev.to/dakdevs/delete-all-releases-from-github-repo-13ad

But it only works for releases where the name equals the tag. As soon as a name has spaces in it, awk fails to separate the columns properly.

maybe the gh cli output changed since the article was written or awk on macos has different defaults?

Answer 1

Adding -F '\t' helped awk to separate the columns correctly. This command deletes all gh releases:

gh release list | awk -F '\t' '{print $3}' | while read -r line; do gh release delete -y "$line"; done

You can also delete the tags with the following flag:

--cleanup-tag   Delete the specified tag in addition to its release

Answer 2

I happened to need to do this exact thing (delete all of the releases in a repo), and I was able to use cut for this successfully. Here's the command I ran:

gh release list --limit 500 \
  | cut -f3 \
  | while read release_tag; do
  gh release delete -y "$release_tag"
done

This works because the gh output is tab-separated, and cut separates fields by tabs by default. So cut -f3 takes the third field in the output, which is the release tag.

Other notes:

• The -y option makes it so that it doesn't ask you to confirm before deleting each release. Useful if you're confident that you know what you're doing and you have a lot of releases to delete.

• The --limit 500 part is optional. The default page size is 30, so if you have more than 30 releases, you need to use the --limit option to make the page size bigger and fetch all of your releases, instead of just the first 30.

• Like Jonas mentioned, you can include the --cleanup-tag option when deleting a release to also delete the tag.