anonymous_github

Why

Double-anonymous review asks you to anonymize the artifact behind your paper — the code and data — exactly like the paper itself. Doing that by hand (owner, organization, repository name, logins, and every mention buried in the files) is tedious and easy to get wrong. Anonymous GitHub does it for you and serves the result behind a shareable link.

A free public instance is available at anonymous.4open.science.

What it anonymizes

• The GitHub owner, organization, and repository name
• File and directory names
• File contents of every extension (Markdown, text, source code, …), replacing a configurable list of terms

Usage

Public instance

Just open anonymous.4open.science, paste your repository URL, add the terms to hide, and share the generated link.

Git submodules

Direct public GitHub submodules are included in the file browser and ZIP downloads at the commit recorded by the parent repository. Their paths and contents use the parent’s anonymization settings. .gitmodules files are omitted from shared GitHub content because they contain source repository URLs.

The service expands up to 20 direct submodules and 10,000 combined child tree entries. Private, non-GitHub, nested, missing, oversized, and truncated submodules remain empty folders with a warning. Child files are fetched anonymously on demand; child tree lookups use GitHub’s unauthenticated API quota. ZIP downloads fetch public child archives. Existing cached repositories with .gitmodules rebuild their file trees on the next listing or ZIP download. No manual database migration is required.

CLI

Anonymize a repository locally and produce an anonymized zip:

npm install -g @tdurieux/anonymous_github
anonymous_github

LLM and automation clients

Use expiring, repository-scoped maintenance tokens to inspect saved status, edit anonymization settings, refresh snapshots, and extend expiration. A signed-in owner or coauthor can issue and revoke tokens through /api/user/maintenance-tokens. See the client guide and OpenAPI description, also served at /llms.txt and /maintenance-openapi.json on each instance. These tokens cannot access GitHub previews, file downloads, or admin routes.

Self-hosting

Local installation requires Node.js 22.15 or newer in the 22.x series, 24.x, or 26 or newer. Run npm ci and npm run build to install and build. npm run dev uses Node’s watch mode; npm run build:ui rebuilds browser assets.

For the November 2026 dependency update, install from the committed lockfile with npm ci, rebuild with npm run build, and restart the API and streamer services together. Docker installations should rebuild the application image. This dependency update does not change MongoDB documents, Redis keys, or queue formats, so it requires no production data migration. Existing credential migration requirements still apply when upgrading from an older release.

The glob and minimatch overrides select security fixes unavailable through the dependency ranges of archive and development tools. Keep them until those packages accept patched versions. CI checks the full dependency audit and runs MongoDB migration, Redis session, and archive compatibility tests on Node 22 and 24. To run the database tests locally, point TEST_MONGODB_URI and PERFORMANCE_MONGO_URI at disposable MongoDB databases and set PERFORMANCE_REDIS_PORT to a disposable Redis instance. The performance database name must begin with perf_test_; these tests delete their test data.

git clone https://github.com/tdurieux/anonymous_github/
cd anonymous_github
npm i

GITHUB_TOKEN=<GITHUB_TOKEN>
CLIENT_ID=<CLIENT_ID>
CLIENT_SECRET=<CLIENT_SECRET>
CREDENTIAL_KEYS='{"2026-09":"<base64-encoded 32-byte random key>"}'
CREDENTIAL_ACTIVE_KEY_ID=2026-09
CREDENTIAL_LEGACY_READS=false
PORT=5000
DB_USERNAME=
DB_PASSWORD=
AUTH_CALLBACK=http://localhost:5000/github/auth

docker-compose up -d

Owner email alerts

Set RESEND_API_KEY and EMAIL_FROM on the web server and download workers to send access alerts through Resend. Use a sender address on a domain verified in Resend. APP_HOSTNAME sets the host used for the connections link in emails.

Registration saves a verified GitHub email address, preferring the primary address. OAuth requests user:email; GitHub App sign-in uses the read-only email permission described in the setup guide. Later sign-ins also fill missing addresses. Saved addresses and custom alert addresses are preserved. GitHub privacy placeholder addresses are not imported.

Signed-in owners without an email address see an email form in a popup. “Remind me later” dismisses it for the current login session; “Never” saves a permanent preference on the account. Existing addresses are reused, and owners can add or change their address on the connections page at any time. Alerts cover invalid GitHub credentials and repository access errors encountered while reading or refreshing content. No periodic access scan is performed. Emails contain no repository names, anonymous URLs, or credentials.

An atomic recipient claim allows one email attempt per normalized address across repositories, pull requests, gists and accounts. Suppression has no time expiry. Sign-in, reconnecting, successful access recovery, resource removal or expiration, and disabling the original account retain suppression for that address. Inactive resources cannot trigger new alerts. Changing to an address that has never been notified permits its first alert.

Failed deliveries and interrupted sends whose outcome is unknown also stay blocked to avoid duplicate delivery. Unsent claims can be cancelled by confirmed recovery before dispatch. Bookkeeping failures release claims when no provider request has started. Pending claims interrupted before dispatch can be reclaimed after a 60-second lease during startup or a new notification attempt. Claim identity and state checks prevent a paused sender from dispatching after another instance reclaims its claim. Cancellation is saved before cleanup; matching legacy fields are cleared before the guard is released. Interrupted cleanup resumes on startup or a later notification. Legacy fields carry an attempt ID so unrelated deliveries and newer generations are preserved. A resource revision prevents delayed preparation from recreating a reclaimed claim. All asynchronous preparation stays pending. A sending reservation is reclaimable until dispatch commits atomically on the owner document, against its reset revision and lease, immediately before contacting the provider. Cancellation competes with that same commitment, so a paused sender cannot dispatch afterward. Owner dispatch records distinguish known-unsent reservations from interrupted committed sends. Completed records are removed; expired uncommitted records are pruned on later attempts. Persistent reset revisions also fence attempts created while a reset is in progress, even when no recipient guard existed at its start. Recovery recorded during an active reset is retried when reset finishes or its lease expires, with the original source and revision checks. Provider idempotency keys and redacted attempt records support auditing without storing recipient addresses or repository names in the audit log. Records include owner and resource IDs, resource kind, generation and a categorized access failure to identify the trigger without exposing the address. Attempt records are saved before dispatch, with completion recorded separately. Existing resource claims are migrated to recipient guards before new application instances serve requests using an indexed scan with resumable checkpoints. Other instances wait while its lease is healthy, and take over if the lease expires. Every existing resource claim is retained behind the recipient guard. Recovery marks claims recovered without authorizing another email. Completed provider results are recorded before guard updates, with bounded retries and reconciliation on startup or a later notification. The upgrade restores missing recipient guards from immutable provider completion records, including guards previously released by recovery or resource removal. This history scan uses an index and resumable checkpoints and does not send email. Its recipient-alerts-v2 database marker is independent of the v1 marker, so cold starts also restore missing suppression. Resource lifecycle mutations advance the owner dispatch fence and block new attempts until the status write completes. Concurrent mutations keep separate reservations. Failed or ambiguous status writes retain suppression for that owner; run the offline reconciliation command below after stopping all writers to clear interrupted reservations safely.

Use scripts/deploy.sh when upgrading recipient alert suppression. The new image has the science.4open.owner-alert-protocol=recipient-v2 label. When running application containers have an older or missing protocol label, the script builds the replacement, stops and verifies all old API and streamer containers, then prepares a full claim reconciliation and starts the new streamers and API. Stopped legacy containers from a rollback also trigger reconciliation, so claims written after an earlier migration are included. This path also runs when retrying with an already-built image and FORCE=0. Once writers are stopped, preparation releases all known unsent pending claims and clears their matching legacy fields before backfill. This upgrade pauses traffic while claims migrate and allows up to 15 minutes for startup, configurable with MIGRATION_HEALTH_TIMEOUT. Subsequent deployments keep the usual rolling streamer replacement. Manual upgrades must stop all application writers, run docker compose run --rm --no-deps --entrypoint node anonymous_github ./build/scripts/reconcile-legacy-owner-alerts.js using the new image, and then start the new application instances. Run this preparation after legacy writers have operated, even if their containers were already removed. Ordinary restarts preserve confirmed recoveries. Leaving either Resend setting empty disables delivery and the email prompt.

Scope of anonymization

In double-anonymous review, the boundary of anonymization is the paper plus its online appendix — and only that. Googling part of the paper or appendix to reveal authorship is considered a deliberate attempt to break anonymity (explanation).

How it works

Anonymous GitHub either downloads the full repository and anonymizes each file, or proxies requests to GitHub on the fly. In both cases the original and anonymized versions are cached on the server, so even large repositories stay responsive.

Related tools

• gitmask — contribute anonymously to a GitHub repository.
• blind-reviews — browser add-on that hides identifying information when reviewing a pull request.

See also

• Open science and double-anonymous peer review
• ACM policy on double-blind reviewing

License

GPL-3.0 © Thomas Durieux

Frontend development

The UI uses Vue 3 and Vue Router with the existing Express API. Page setup functions live in public/script/app.js and admin.js; the Vue templates are in public/partials/. Gulp compiles the templates and bundles the app with esbuild, then updates the asset manifest used by Express.

Run npm run build:ui after changing a template or frontend script. Use npm run dev:ui to serve the built UI locally with API requests proxied to the configured upstream. npm run test:ui rebuilds the assets and runs the frontend regression and DOM interaction tests. npm run build also builds the UI for production.

The initial bundle contains the Vue app. Markdown extensions load on content routes; PDF.js, Ace, and notebook support load when their viewers mount. Org support loads in the repository explorer, and Mermaid loads only when a diagram is encountered. These libraries use hashed URLs and load once per tab.

The Docker build compiles the same bundles and copies them, the asset manifest, and document-worker assets into the runtime image. The Compose app serves these assets directly; no frontend development server is needed.

Paid hosting

Optional Stripe billing supports monthly and annual author subscriptions, repository review passes, and prepaid conference packages. Billing is disabled by default. See the setup and rollout guide for prices, capacities, webhooks, migration behavior, and test-mode verification.