GitHub Handbook
Auto Archival Policy
The Department of Veterans Affairs mandates that any repositories must be archived if they do not have activity in the past 12 months. This policy is enforced by automated workflows in GitHub that measure the most recent activity in repositories and archive them automatically. This process runs every week.
What is considered activity?
In this case “activity” is defined as:
- Git source activity: commits or pushes in the repository’s Git content
- GitHub activity: working with issues, pull requests, repository settings, etc.
How do I prevent my repository from being archived?
Active repositories will automatically be exempt due to the activity within them.
Template repositories are exempt from this process regardless of their activity.
For other cases where dormant repositories need to avoid being archived, repository admins can set the do-not-archive
repository custom property to true to prevent their repositories from being auto-archived even if they have not had
activity in the required time frame.
What happens to an archived repository?
Archiving a repository essentially freezes the repository in a read-only state. Users with access to the repository can still view it in a read-only fashion, but the repository cannot be changed, Actions workflows do not run, etc. See the GitHub Archiving repositories documentation for more.
Archiving a repository is not permanent and no data is lost.
How can I restore my repository if it gets archived?
Repository admins can create a support request to ask for their repositories to be un-archived if they were incorrectly archived as part of this process.