When GitHub Went Dark: How OWASP BLT Found a New Home

Description and use

OWASP BLT lost access to 50+ GitHub repositories during an outage, migrated to GitLab, then to a self-hosted ForkMesh forge, consolidating all projects into one repository while preserving history and establishing a backup mirror on GitHub.

Problem

OWASP BLT lost access to 50+ GitHub repositories during a GitHub outage, halting development during Google Summer of Code.

Outcome

OWASP BLT successfully recovered from a platform outage, consolidated its projects into a single forge, preserved 45,000+ commits and 260+ contributors, and established a resilient multi-platform strategy.

Workflow

• Applied organization-wide GitHub ruleset
• GitHub outage caused all repos to go offline
• Contacted GitHub support with no resolution
• Migrated code to GitLab and restored CI
• Community members redirected to GitLab
• Kaif built ForkMesh self-hosted Git forge
• Migrated all projects to ForkMesh forge
• Consolidated 50+ repos into one repository preserving history
• Set up GitHub as read-only mirror
• Archived GitLab repositories and migrated issues/PRs
• Cleaned technical debt and improved infrastructure

Evidence

We woke up to find our GitHub repositories offline. All 50+ of them.

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We applied an organization-wide GitHub ruleset to enforce consistent repository protections across all our projects.

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We moved our repositories to GitLab.

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He built ForkMesh, a self-hosted Git forge.

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Our official source of truth is now git.owaspblt.org/BLT, running on ForkMesh.

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45,000+ commits preserved, 260+ contributors represented.

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