How to find Github forks of a deleted project?

Question

Recently there was an interesting article posted about a new feature in Laravel 5.3 called echo wherein it provided a demo video on Laracasts and cited a Github repository.

Unfortunately the original repository was deleted. Luckily I was able to search and locate a fork made before the deletion. You can see there were actually 27 forks made, but none of the others turned up in my searches probably because of the generic name.

Is there a more dependable way to discover forks of a deleted project than brute trial search?

Answer 1

This search query on Google may help:

"forked from {user-name}/{repo-name}" site:github.com

I tried it for a deleted repo with forks < 100 and got very precise 4 results and only those 4 results.

It still does not work for a deleted repo with only 1 fork I think. At least it's another way to try.

Btw, you may want to remove the double quotes to get more results. However in my case they all point to the deleted repo so usually this may not be as helpful as you might think.

Answer 2

if you know the number of forks you can search based on the number of forks

you can also search by date. also remember

To include forks in the search results, you will need to add fork:true or fork:only to your query.

EDIT: you can use this python script find-fork.py made by akumria to help you find your desired fork

Answer 3

I think you can narrow your search a lot when scoping on language. E.g. using echo-demo language:PHP as a query in the GitHub search field.