Over time I’ve managed to build up quite the collection of Gists over at Github, including secret ones there’s about 1200 currently. Some of these have useful code in, some are just garbage output. I’d quite like a local copy either way, so I can easily search¹ across them.

1. Install the gist command from Github

   brew install gist
   

2. Login to your Github Account through the gist tool (it’ll prompt for your login credentials, then generate you an API Token to allow it future access.)

   gist --login
   

3. Create a folder, go inside it and download all your gists!

   mkdir gist_archive
   cd gist_archive
   for repo in $(gist -l | awk '{ print $1 }'); do git clone $repo 2> /dev/null; done
   

4. Now you have a snapshot of all your gists. To update them in future, you can run the above for any new gists, and update all the existing ones with:

   cd gist_archive
   for i in */; do (cd $i && git pull --rebase); done
   

Now go forth and search out your favourite snippet you saved years ago and forgot about!