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star-watch 🌟👀

Monitor your GitHub starred repositories for archival status.

Problem: You star hundreds of repos. When one gets archived (like Algolia's hn-search), you often don't know until you need it.

Solution: A simple CLI tool that checks your starred repos and alerts you when any get archived.

Installation

npm install -g @indiekitai/star-watch
# or
npx @indiekitai/star-watch

Usage

# Check your starred repos (requires GITHUB_TOKEN)
star-watch check

# Only check the first N starred repos
star-watch check --limit 50

# Machine-readable output (for scripts / CI)
star-watch check --json

# List archived repos detected by the last check (reads local state, no token needed)
star-watch list-archived

# Show help
star-watch help

Exit codes

Code	Meaning
0	Check completed, no newly archived repos
1	Error (missing token, API failure, unknown command)
2	Check completed and found newly archived repos since last run

This makes check usable in a cron job or CI step that alerts only when something changes.

Configuration

Set your GitHub token (a classic token with the public_repo scope, or a fine-grained token with read access, is sufficient to read your stars):

export GITHUB_TOKEN=your_token_here

State is persisted to ~/.star-watch-state.json by default. Override with STAR_WATCH_STATE=/path/to/state.json.

MCP server (optional)

mcp_server.py exposes the same checks as MCP tools (star_watch_check, star_watch_repo) for use from an MCP-capable agent. It requires Python and fastmcp:

pip install fastmcp
GITHUB_TOKEN=... python mcp_server.py

Why?

• Algolia's hn-search just got archived (Feb 2026)
• Many useful tools disappear silently
• Forks exist but you need to know about them
• Catch deprecation before it's too late

Potential Extensions

• Discord/Slack/Telegram notifications
• Suggest active forks
• Track dependency repos too
• RSS feed output