GitHub Auto Follow/Unfollow Script (Serverless)

A small automation script for GitHub follow/unfollow that I built because I'm too lazy to do this manually.

This application runs on AWS Serverless components on a configurable schedule (e.g. once a day).

Cost stays within the AWS Free Tier under typical usage (no additional costs).

When you have many followers, processing them synchronously takes a long time, so the script is written using aiohttp and coroutines to run requests asynchronously.

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AWS Deploy Guide

0. Clone repository

git clone https://github.com/Scanf-s/aws-github-auto-follow.git

1. Prepare your own AWS account with an Access Key and Secret Key

• For simplicity, you can attach the Administrator role to your IAM user.

2. Issue your GitHub API key

3. Build the Lambda function

make build

4. Deploy AWS infrastructure (first time only)

sam deploy --guided

--guided will prompt you for the following. The values are saved to samconfig.toml, so subsequent deploys do not need them again.

Prompt	Description	Example
Stack Name	CloudFormation stack name (any unique name within the account/region)	github-autofollow
AWS Region	Region to deploy to	ap-northeast-2
Parameter LambdaFunctionName	Lambda function name	GithubAutoFollowLambda
Parameter GithubUsername	Your GitHub username	blabla
Parameter GithubToken	GitHub Personal Access Token (user:follow, read:user scopes)	ghp_xxx...
Parameter GithubApiUrl	GitHub API endpoint (press Enter to use the default)	https://api.github.com
Parameter ScheduleExpression	EventBridge schedule (rate or cron) — see section 6	rate(3 hours)
Confirm changes before deploy	Review changesets before applying	Y/N
Allow SAM CLI IAM role creation	Required for the Lambda execution role	Y/N
Save arguments to configuration file	Save answers to samconfig.toml	Y/N

You can just press Enter to accept the defaults for any other prompts.

5. (Optional) Update the function

make build
sam deploy

6. Change the EventBridge schedule

The Lambda is triggered by an EventBridge rule defined via the ScheduleExpression parameter in template.yml. You can change it without editing the template by passing a parameter override.

Supported expression formats (see AWS docs):

• rate(N minutes|hours|days) — fixed interval. e.g. rate(1 hour), rate(1 day)
• cron(min hour day month day-of-week year) — UTC, 6 fields. One of day / day-of-week must be ?. e.g. cron(0 0 * * ? *) runs daily at 00:00 UTC (09:00 KST)

Update only the schedule on an existing stack:

sam deploy \
  --parameter-overrides ScheduleExpression="rate(1 day)"

Or edit samconfig.toml (parameter_overrides) so the new value persists across future deploys.

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Local Execution Guide

1. Requirements

• Python 3.12 or later
• uv (recommended) or pip

2. Environment variables

Copy .env.example to .env and fill in the values.

cp .env.example .env

You can issue a GitHub Personal Access Token here. The required scopes are user:follow and read:user.

3. Install dependencies and run

Using uv (recommended)

uv sync
uv run python main.py

Using pip

python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate   # Windows: .venv\Scripts\activate
pip install -e .
python main.py

When executed, the script performs the following actions on the current account:

• Users who follow you but you do not follow back → follow
• Users you follow but who do not follow you → unfollow

4. Options

CLI flags

• --dry-run : List the target users without making any actual changes
• --concurrency N : Number of concurrent API requests (default: 5)

uv run python main.py --dry-run
uv run python main.py --concurrency 10

Environment variables (optional)

• CONCURRENCY : Number of concurrent requests (CLI flag takes precedence)
• EXCLUDE_FOLLOW : Comma-separated list of users to skip when following
• EXCLUDE_UNFOLLOW : Comma-separated list of users to skip when unfollowing
• DRY_RUN : Run in dry-run mode on Lambda (1 / true)

5. Tests

uv run pytest

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