Upcoming Changes to GitHub Services

We are finishing up a new GitHub Services backend, dubbed “Hookshot”, to increase the speed and reliability of our delivered payloads. We are doing what we can to make this a seamless transition for everyone. However, there are a few notable changes.

• There is a new Meta API endpoint listing the current public IPs that hooks originate from.

• We’re removing the AMQP service from GitHub. It hasn’t worked in quite some time, and the code it uses doesn’t work in our background workers.

• We’re also instituting a new guideline to improve the reliability and maintainability of services in the future. As of today, all new services must accept an unmodified payload over HTTP. Any service that does not will be rejected. To see an example of an acceptable service, check out Code Climate. Notice their service simply accepts HTTP POST from GitHub unmodified. For an example of a service that won’t be accepted after today, check out Campfire. It uses other Ruby gems and contains custom logic to transform the GitHub payload to Campfire messages. Existing hooks will keep working (don’t worry 37signals, we :heart: Campfire).

We’re making these changes because we want to focus on the reliability of the core Services backend for everyone. Maintaining custom logic and libraries for over 100 services is taking too much of this focus away.