Making a Private Gist Public

Update, December 2014: These steps are no longer necessary. GitHub added a button for changing a Gist’s privacy:


Gist is a great tool for sharing and storing snippets of code, notes, and any other text you want. It lets you create private or public Gists — basically, sets of text files.

Sadly, it’s not easy to switch a Gist from private to public (or vice versa). But you can do it with a little Git-fu, since each Gist is its own Git repo. Here’s how to do it.

Copy the Private Clone URL from the Gist’s page and clone the Gist to a temporary directory:

{% highlight bash %}
~ $ git clone git@gist.github.com:PRIVATEGIST.git gist-private-temp
~ $ cd git-private-temp
{% endhighlight %}

From the Gist web interface, create a new public Gist. You’ll need to add some dummy text to a file in the Gist, because you can’t create a totally empty Gist. This placeholder file will be deleted in the next step.

Copy the Private Clone URL from this new public Gist. Add the public Gist as a remote in your cloned copy of the private Gist, and push to it. A forced push is required since the new Gist contains that placeholder file.

{% highlight bash %}
~/gist-private-temp/ $ git remote add public git@gist.github.com:PUBLICGIST.git
~/gist-private-temp/ $ git push -f public
{% endhighlight %}

Finally, to get the new Gist content to appear on your Gist home page, you might need to go to the Gist’s page, edit it, and resave it without making any changes.

I was thinking about making a script to do this, but my understanding is that the necessary Gist API methods are only available in the Github API v3, which is not yet stable; and I couldn’t find any Github API libraries that support it yet.

Update, in March 2014: Github’s V3 API is now stable, and someday soon now I’ll get around to writing that script. Promise.