Staying Evergreen: How we automated secure access and repo hygiene in a shared org

Evergreen is a GitHub App developed to automate repository hygiene for organizations that collaborate with external users, focusing on quarterly reviews of outside collaborator access and detection and archival of inactive repositories. Built from native GitHub capabilities including Actions, webhooks, issues, custom properties, and a controller repository, it stores per-repository JSON state in Git to provide an auditable history without a separate database. Access reviews create repository issues with checklists for authorized internal owners, retain selected collaborators, and revoke unconfirmed access by default, while stale repositories receive warnings before archival and are never deleted. The system uses owner-notification fallbacks, exemption properties, retry behavior for failed removals, reminder messages, and issue comments that document changes and facilitate reversals. Its rollout emphasized dry runs, communication, structured monitoring, and paced batch processing to accommodate GitHub rate limits, illustrating an approach that makes secure, recoverable, and routine repository maintenance easier at organizational scale.

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