Handling webhook deliveries - GitHub Enterprise Cloud Docs

Introduction

When you create a webhook, you specify a URL and subscribe to event types. 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.

This article describes how to write code to let your server listen for and respond to webhook deliveries. You will test your code by using your computer or codespace as a local server.

Setup

In order to test your webhook locally, you can use a webhook proxy URL to forward webhooks from GitHub to your computer or codespace. This article uses smee.io to provide a webhook proxy URL and forward webhooks.

Get a webhook proxy URL

In your browser, navigate to https://smee.io/.
Click Start a new channel.
Copy the full URL under "Webhook Proxy URL". You will use this URL in the following setup steps.

Forward webhooks

If you don't already have smee-client installed, run the following command in your terminal:
Shell
```
npm install --global smee-client
```
```
npm install --global smee-client
```
To receive forwarded webhooks from smee.io, run the following command in your terminal. Replace WEBHOOK_PROXY_URL with your webhook proxy URL from earlier.
Shell
```
smee --url WEBHOOK_PROXY_URL --path /webhook --port 3000
```
```
smee --url WEBHOOK_PROXY_URL --path /webhook --port 3000
```
You should see output that looks like this, where WEBHOOK_PROXY_URL is your webhook proxy URL:
Shell
```
Forwarding WEBHOOK_PROXY_URL to http://127.0.0.1:3000/webhook
Connected WEBHOOK_PROXY_URL
```
```
Forwarding WEBHOOK_PROXY_URL to http://127.0.0.1:3000/webhook
Connected WEBHOOK_PROXY_URL
```
Note that the path is /webhook and the port is 3000. You will use these values later when you write code to handle webhook deliveries.
Keep this running while you test out your webhook. When you want to stop forwarding webhooks, enter Ctrl+C .

Create a webhook

Create a webhook with the following settings. For more information, see Creating webhooks.
- For the URL, use your webhook proxy URL from earlier.
- If you have an option to choose the content type, use JSON.

Write code to handle webhook deliveries

In order to handle webhook deliveries, you need to write code that will:

Initialize your server to listen for requests to your webhook URL
Read the HTTP headers and body from the request
Take the desired action in response to the request

You can use any programming language that you can run on your server.

The following examples print a message when a webhook delivery is received. However, you can modify the code to take another action, such as making a request to the GitHub API or sending a Slack message.

Ruby example
JavaScript example

Ruby example

This example uses the Ruby gem, Sinatra, to define routes and handle HTTP requests. For more information, see the Sinatra README.

Ruby example: Install dependencies

To use this example, you must install the sinatra gem in your Ruby project. For example, you can do this with Bundler:

If you don't already have Bundler installed, run the following command in your terminal:
Shell
```
gem install bundler
```
```
gem install bundler
```
If you don't already have a Gemfile for your app, run the following command in your terminal:
Shell
```
bundle init
```
```
bundle init
```
If you don't already have a Gemfile.lock for your app, run the following command in your terminal: