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About webhooks

In this article

Webhooks provide a way for notifications to be delivered to an external web server whenever certain events occur on GitHub.

About webhooks

Webhooks let you subscribe to events happening in a software system and automatically receive a delivery of data to your server whenever those events occur.

Webhooks are used to receive data as it happens, as opposed to polling an API (calling an API intermittently) to see if data is available. With webhooks, you only need to express interest in an event once, when you create the webhook.

Webhooks are used in a wide range of scenarios, including:

  • Triggering CI (continuous integration) pipelines on an external CI server. For example, to trigger CI in Jenkins or CircleCI when code is pushed to a branch.
  • Sending notifications about events on GitHub to collaboration platforms. For example, sending a notification to Discord or Slack when there's a review on a pull request.
  • Updating an external issue tracker like Jira.
  • Deploying to a production server.
  • Logging events as they happen on GitHub, for audit purposes.

About webhooks on GitHub

When you create a webhook, you specify a URL and subscribe to events that occur on GitHub. When an event that your webhook is subscribed to occurs, GitHub will send an HTTP request with data about the event to the URL that you specified. If your server is set up to listen for webhook deliveries at that URL, it can take action when it receives one.