What are webhooks in GitHub, and how to use them?

Introduction

Webhooks allow you to subscribe to events in a software system and receive data delivery to your server as they occur.

Webhooks are used to receive data in real time, as opposed to polling an API (calling an API intermittently) to see if data is available. In this blog, we’ll answer the question What are webhooks? , use situations, benefits, and how to add webhooks in GitHub.

What are Webhooks?

You create a webhook by specifying a URL and subscribing to GitHub events. When an event to which your webhook is registered occurs, GitHub sends an HTTP request to the URL you provide, containing event details. If your server is configured to listen for webhook deliveries at that URL, it can respond when one is received.

You could set up your webhook, for instance, to react when someone adds a new team member, opens a pull request, creates a GitHub Pages site, or uploads code to a repository. In response, your server might launch a continuous integration pipeline, push code to production, send out a notification, or create a GitHub project just for the new team member.

Webhooks are used in a variety of situations, including:

• Triggering continuous integration (CI) pipelines on an external CI server. For example, when code is pushed to a branch, Jenkins or CircleCI can be triggered.
• Sending notifications about GitHub events to collaboration platforms. For example, send a notification to Discord or Slack when a pull request is reviewed.
• Update an external problem tracker such as Jira.
• Deploying to the production server.
• Logging events as they occur on GitHub for auditing purposes.

The following are some benefits of using webhooks instead of the API:

• Polling an API requires more resources and effort than using webhooks.
• More scalable than API calls are webhooks. Calling the API for every resource you need to monitor could soon push you over your allotted API rate limit limitation. As an alternative, you can subscribe to several webhook events and only get notified when something happens.
• Since webhooks are activated in response to events, they enable updates in almost real-time.

Adding Webhook in GitHub

You can set up webhooks by following the given process to receive notifications when specific events occur in a repository, organization, GitHub Marketplace account, GitHub Sponsors account, or GitHub App.

Step 1: Choose a repository and login

Proceed to your code repository after logging onto GitHub.

Step 2: Go to the settings

To access the settings page, click the settings tab located at the upper right corner of the screen.

Step 3: Launch the WebhooksManagement Interface

Click the Webhooks option from the menu on the left.

Step 4: Include a fresh webhook.

On the Webhook screen, click the Add Webhook button located in the upper right corner.

Step 5: Modify or Add Webhook Data

Incorporate the subsequent details into the Add Webhook window:

• Payload URL: Webhook URL here>.
• Content-Type: form-urlencoded> or application/json, depending on what you need
• Secret
• Triggering Events: press the event or select the option <let me choose>
• Click the green "Add Webhook" button after entering the previously mentioned data.

Conclusion

To sum up, webhooks are an effective feature in GitHub that lets developers integrate GitHub with other services and applications and automate a variety of processes. Developers can set up webhooks to listen for particular events and then use those events to start code deployment, test runs, or notification campaigns.

Collaboration, productivity, and development process efficiency can all be increased by using webhooks. The features provided by GitHub webhooks make them an indispensable tool in any developer's toolbox, especially as the demand for effective, automated development workflows grows.