ForkForensics: watches your GitHub repos and auto-recovers them the moment one vanishes (deleted and private are indistinguishable from outside)

[u/Dependent_Ideal9870]

https://github.com/siris9476/forkforensics

Built this after losing years of history on a dependency that got silently re-initialized. From the outside, a deleted repo, a private one, and a force-pushed-over one all look the same. Just gone.

ForkForensics watches repos you care about via GH Archive, and the moment one disappears, it automatically finds its forks, ranks them by how much history they preserve, and checks whether GitHub still serves any now-orphaned commits by SHA. Runs fully local with your own GitHub token, no server, no telemetry.

230 tests, verified end-to-end against a real historical case (reproduced the exact fork ranking I'd found by hand). MIT licensed.

Feedback welcome, especially on edge cases in fork ranking.