Remove unreadable GitHub notifications

• 05/01/2023
• One-minute read
• DevOps githubcli

This little post describes how to remove a special edge case of GitHub notifications that cannot be marked as read from the web interface

I had a problem with GitHub: years ago I starred a repository that remained silent for some time; recently the authors decided to catch the attention of everyone and wrote a bot to mention every stargazer in a GitHub issue, promoting the project.

Eventually the repository went private (got banned?).

The problem is that I still had the mention indicator in my GitHub notifications. There is no way to remove it from the web interface.

Eventually I managed the remove the notification by using the GitHub CLI.

Mark read a notification with GitHub CLI

1. Install the GitHub CLI.
2. Authenticate from GitHub CLI.
3. Use gh api notifications to get a JSON containing all your notifications.
4. Note the notification (thread) ID (<id>) of the bad repository.
5. Execute gh api --method PATCH notifications/threads/<id> to read all the notifications of the given thread ID.

Use the documentation as reference.

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