GitHub 5-repository limit for scheduled notifications - is this new or can it be overridden?

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1

I work at a company with over 100,000 repositories on GitHub. Several years back, I set up automated Slack notifications for open pull requests using GitHub’s scheduled reminder feature.

For a long time, I kept adding new repos to this reminder as we created them. Right now it has about 50 repositories configured and has been working fine.

But yesterday when I tried adding another repo, GitHub threw an error saying reminders can only have 5 repositories maximum. This is weird because my existing reminder already has 50 repos and has been running for years without issues.

I ended up creating a separate reminder for the new repository with the same schedule. I guess I’ll have to make new reminders every time I hit the 5-repo limit going forward.

The strange part is that GitHub’s documentation mentions this 5-repo restriction like it’s always existed, but that can’t be right since my original reminder has 50 repos.

Has anyone else run into this? Is the 5-repository limit something GitHub added recently, or is there a way to get around it? Managing multiple reminders instead of one centralized one is going to be a pain.

2

You’re right - this change is pretty recent. GitHub added the 5-repo limit for scheduled reminders in late 2022 or early 2023. That’s why your 50-repo reminder still works fine. They grandfathered existing reminders that went over the limit, but any new ones or changes to old ones have to follow the new rules. I hit this same problem six months ago trying to modify an older reminder with about 20 repos. Your workaround with separate reminders is basically what everyone’s doing now. There’s no official way around it, even with enterprise accounts. Some teams switched to third-party GitHub Apps or custom webhooks for notifications across bigger repo sets, but that’s way more work than the built-in feature.