Now that we understand the basics of webhooks, let's go through the process of building out our own webhook-powered integration. In this tutorial, we'll create a repository webhook that will be responsible for listing out how popular our repository is, based on the number of issues it receives per day.
Creating a webhook is a two-step process. You'll first need to set up how you want your webhook to behave through GitHub Enterprise Server: what events should it listen to. After that, you'll set up your server to receive and manage the payload.
The webhook REST APIs enable you to manage repository and organization webhooks. For more information, see:
Exposing localhost to the internet
For the purposes of this tutorial, we're going to use a local server to receive messages from GitHub. So, first of all, we need to expose our local development environment to the internet. We'll use ngrok to do this. ngrok is available, free of charge, for all major operating systems. For more information, see the ngrok download page.
After installing ngrok, you can expose your localhost by running ./ngrok http 4567 on the command line. 4567 is the port number on which our server will listen for messages. You should see a line that looks something like this:
$ Forwarding http://7e9ea9dc.ngrok.io -> 127.0.0.1:4567Make a note of the *.ngrok.io URL. We'll use it to set up our webhook.
Setting up a webhook
You can install webhooks on an organization or on a specific repository.
To set up a webhook, go to the settings page of your repository or organization. From there, click Webhooks, then Add webhook.
Alternatively, you can choose to build and manage a webhook through the Webhooks API.
Webhooks require a few configuration options before you can make use of them. We'll go through each of these settings below.
Payload URL
The payload URL is the URL of the server that will receive the webhook POST requests.