How a Simple Mistake Erased 54,000 Stars from HTTPie – Lessons for Repo Management

HTTPie is an open‑source command‑line HTTP client designed to make interacting with web services human‑friendly, offering simple syntax for creating and sending arbitrary HTTP requests via http and https commands.

First committed on GitHub in 2012, the project has grown over ten years to become one of the most popular API tools on the platform, accumulating more than 54,000 stars and over a thousand watchers.

What happened?

Jakub admitted the incident was caused by his own error: he accidentally set the project repository to private, which caused GitHub to delete the community built over ten years, including all stars and watches.

I unintentionally set the repository to private, and GitHub consequently removed all the stars and watches we had accumulated.

Why set it private?

Jakub explained that making a repository private permanently deletes all watches and stars—a GitHub feature he was aware of—so the action was not intended. He mistakenly thought he was working in a different, empty repository created a week earlier.

The actual repository is httpie/httpie, but the repository he intended to modify was httpie/.github. This naming confusion led him to set httpie/httpie to private instead of httpie/.github.

This is why I set httpie/httpie to private, not httpie/.github .

After the change, Jakub saw an empty repository on the organization page and realized the main HTTPie repository had vanished. He attempted to revert the setting, but GitHub blocked the operation for half an hour while it continued deleting stars and watches.

GitHub’s differentiated treatment and refusal to restore

Jakub contacted GitHub immediately, hoping they could restore the data. Although GitHub has backups (as demonstrated when they restored a mistakenly private GitHub Desktop repository), they refused to restore HTTPie’s data, citing potential side effects and resource costs. Even an offer of monetary compensation was declined.

Developers mistakenly set a GitHub Desktop repository to private; restoring it does not bring back its stars, so we are recovering from a database backup.

Jakub suggested improvements: clearer warnings about destructive actions, and a database design that uses soft deletes with a delayed hard‑delete window.

HTTPie has since been made public again and, at the time of writing, has regained over 16,000 stars.