LFE Docs

Webhooks

The Repository Webhooks API allows repository admins to manage the post-receive hooks for a repository. Webhooks can be managed using the JSON HTTP API, or the PubSubHubbub API.

If you would like to set up a single webhook to receive events from all of your organization’s respositories, check out our API documentation for Organization Webhooks.

List hooks

GET /repos/:owner/:repo/hooks

Response

Status: 200 OK
Link: <https://api.github.com/resource?page=2>; rel="next",
      <https://api.github.com/resource?page=5>; rel="last"
X-RateLimit-Limit: 5000
X-RateLimit-Remaining: 4999
[
  {
    "id": 1,
    "url": "https://api.github.com/repos/octocat/Hello-World/hooks/1",
    "test_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/octocat/Hello-World/hooks/1/test",
    "ping_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/octocat/Hello-World/hooks/1/pings",
    "name": "web",
    "events": [
      "push",
      "pull_request"
    ],
    "active": true,
    "config": {
      "url": "http://example.com/webhook",
      "content_type": "json"
    },
    "updated_at": "2011-09-06T20:39:23Z",
    "created_at": "2011-09-06T17:26:27Z"
  }
]

Get single hook

GET /repos/:owner/:repo/hooks/:id

Response

Status: 200 OK
X-RateLimit-Limit: 5000
X-RateLimit-Remaining: 4999
{
  "id": 1,
  "url": "https://api.github.com/repos/octocat/Hello-World/hooks/1",
  "test_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/octocat/Hello-World/hooks/1/test",
  "ping_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/octocat/Hello-World/hooks/1/pings",
  "name": "web",
  "events": [
    "push",
    "pull_request"
  ],
  "active": true,
  "config": {
    "url": "http://example.com/webhook",
    "content_type": "json"
  },
  "updated_at": "2011-09-06T20:39:23Z",
  "created_at": "2011-09-06T17:26:27Z"
}

Create a hook

POST /repos/:owner/:repo/hooks

Note: Repository service hooks (like email or Campfire) can have at most one configured at a time. Creating hooks for a service that already has one configured will update the existing hook.

Repositories can have multiple webhooks installed. Each webhook should have a unique config. Multiple webhooks can share the same config as long as those webhooks do not have any events that overlap.

Parameters

Name Type Description
name string Required. The name of the service that is being called. (See /hooks for the list of valid hook names.)
config object Required. Key/value pairs to provide settings for this hook. These settings vary between the services and are defined in the github-services repository. Booleans are stored internally as “1” for true, and “0” for false. Any JSON true/false values will be converted automatically.
events array Determines what events the hook is triggered for. Default: ["push"]
active boolean Determines whether the hook is actually triggered on pushes.

Example

To create a webhook, the following fields are required by the config:

Here’s how you can create a hook that posts payloads in JSON format:

{
  "name": "web",
  "active": true,
  "events": [
    "push",
    "pull_request"
  ],
  "config": {
    "url": "http://example.com/webhook",
    "content_type": "json"
  }
}

Response

Status: 201 Created
Location: https://api.github.com/repos/octocat/Hello-World/hooks/1
X-RateLimit-Limit: 5000
X-RateLimit-Remaining: 4999
{
  "id": 1,
  "url": "https://api.github.com/repos/octocat/Hello-World/hooks/1",
  "test_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/octocat/Hello-World/hooks/1/test",
  "ping_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/octocat/Hello-World/hooks/1/pings",
  "name": "web",
  "events": [
    "push",
    "pull_request"
  ],
  "active": true,
  "config": {
    "url": "http://example.com/webhook",
    "content_type": "json"
  },
  "updated_at": "2011-09-06T20:39:23Z",
  "created_at": "2011-09-06T17:26:27Z"
}

Edit a hook

PATCH /repos/:owner/:repo/hooks/:id

Parameters

Name Type Description
config object Key/value pairs to provide settings for this hook. Modifying this will replace the entire config object. These settings vary between the services and are defined in the github-services repository. Booleans are stored internally as “1” for true, and “0” for false. Any JSON true/false values will be converted automatically.
events array Determines what events the hook is triggered for. This replaces the entire array of events. Default: ["push"]
add_events array Determines a list of events to be added to the list of events that the Hook triggers for.
remove_events array Determines a list of events to be removed from the list of events that the Hook triggers for.
active boolean Determines whether the hook is actually triggered on pushes.

Example

{
  "active": true,
  "add_events": [
    "pull_request"
  ]
}

Response

Status: 200 OK
X-RateLimit-Limit: 5000
X-RateLimit-Remaining: 4999
{
  "id": 1,
  "url": "https://api.github.com/repos/octocat/Hello-World/hooks/1",
  "test_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/octocat/Hello-World/hooks/1/test",
  "ping_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/octocat/Hello-World/hooks/1/pings",
  "name": "web",
  "events": [
    "push",
    "pull_request"
  ],
  "active": true,
  "config": {
    "url": "http://example.com/webhook",
    "content_type": "json"
  },
  "updated_at": "2011-09-06T20:39:23Z",
  "created_at": "2011-09-06T17:26:27Z"
}

Test a push hook

This will trigger the hook with the latest push to the current repository if the hook is subscribed to push events. If the hook is not subscribed to push events, the server will respond with 204 but no test POST will be generated.

POST /repos/:owner/:repo/hooks/:id/tests

Note: Previously /repos/:owner/:repo/hooks/:id/test

Response

Status: 204 No Content
X-RateLimit-Limit: 5000
X-RateLimit-Remaining: 4999

Ping a hook

This will trigger a ping event to be sent to the hook.

POST /repos/:owner/:repo/hooks/:id/pings

Response

Status: 204 No Content
X-RateLimit-Limit: 5000
X-RateLimit-Remaining: 4999

Delete a hook

DELETE /repos/:owner/:repo/hooks/:id

Response

Status: 204 No Content
X-RateLimit-Limit: 5000
X-RateLimit-Remaining: 4999

Receiving Webhooks

In order for GitHub to send webhook payloads, your server needs to be accessible from the Internet. We also highly suggest using SSL so that we can send encrypted payloads over HTTPS.

Webhook Headers

GitHub will send along several HTTP headers to differentiate between event types and payload identifiers.

Name Description
X-GitHub-Event The event type that was triggered.
X-GitHub-Delivery A guid to identify the payload and event being sent.
X-Hub-Signature The value of this header is computed as the HMAC hex digest of the body, using the secret config option as the key.

PubSubHubbub

GitHub can also serve as a PubSubHubbub hub for all repositories. PSHB is a simple publish/subscribe protocol that lets servers register to receive updates when a topic is updated. The updates are sent with an HTTP POST request to a callback URL. Topic URLs for a GitHub repository’s pushes are in this format:

https://github.com/:owner/:repo/events/:event

The event can be any event string that is listed at the top of this document.

Response format

The default format is what existing post-receive hooks should expect: A JSON body sent as the payload parameter in a POST. You can also specify to receive the raw JSON body with either an Accept header, or a .json extension.

Accept: application/json
https://github.com/:owner/:repo/events/push.json

Callback URLs

Callback URLs can use either the http:// protocol, or github://. github:// callbacks specify a GitHub service.

# Send updates to postbin.org
http://postbin.org/123

# Send updates to Campfire
github://campfire?subdomain=github&room=Commits&token=abc123

Subscribing

The GitHub PubSubHubbub endpoint is: https://api.github.com/hub. (GitHub Enterprise users should use http://yourhost/api/v3/hub as the PubSubHubbub endpoint, but not change the hub.topic URI format.) A successful request with curl looks like:

curl -u "user" -i \
  https://api.github.com/hub \
  -F "hub.mode=subscribe" \
  -F "hub.topic=https://github.com/:owner/:repo/events/push" \
  -F "hub.callback=http://postbin.org/123"

PubSubHubbub requests can be sent multiple times. If the hook already exists, it will be modified according to the request.

Parameters

Name Type Description
hub.mode string Required. Either subscribe or unsubscribe.
hub.topic string Required. The URI of the GitHub repository to subscribe to. The path must be in the format of /:owner/:repo/events/:event.
hub.callback string The URI to receive the updates to the topic.
hub.secret string A shared secret key that generates a SHA1 HMAC of the outgoing body content. You can verify a push came from GitHub by comparing the raw request body with the contents of the X-Hub-Signature header. You can see our Ruby implementation, or the PubSubHubbub documentation for more details.