6.5 GitHub - Scripting GitHub

First we’ll take a look at Services. Both the Hooks and Services integrations can be found in the Settings section of your repository, where we previously looked at adding Collaborators and changing the default branch of your project. Under the “Webhooks and Services” tab you will see something like Services and Hooks configuration section..

There are dozens of services you can choose from, most of them integrations into other commercial and open source systems. Most of them are for Continuous Integration services, bug and issue trackers, chat room systems and documentation systems. We’ll walk through setting up a very simple one, the Email hook. If you choose “email” from the “Add Service” dropdown, you’ll get a configuration screen like Email service configuration..

In this case, if we hit the “Add service” button, the email address we specified will get an email every time someone pushes to the repository. Services can listen for lots of different types of events, but most only listen for push events and then do something with that data.

If there is a system you are using that you would like to integrate with GitHub, you should check here to see if there is an existing service integration available. For example, if you’re using Jenkins to run tests on your codebase, you can enable the Jenkins builtin service integration to kick off a test run every time someone pushes to your repository.

If you need something more specific or you want to integrate with a service or site that is not included in this list, you can instead use the more generic hooks system. GitHub repository hooks are pretty simple. You specify a URL and GitHub will post an HTTP payload to that URL on any event you want.

Generally the way this works is you can setup a small web service to listen for a GitHub hook payload and then do something with the data when it is received.

To enable a hook, you click the “Add webhook” button in Services and Hooks configuration section.. This will bring you to a page that looks like Web hook configuration..

The configuration for a web hook is pretty simple. In most cases you simply enter a URL and a secret key and hit “Add webhook”. There are a few options for which events you want GitHub to send you a payload for — the default is to only get a payload for the push event, when someone pushes new code to any branch of your repository.

Let’s see a small example of a web service you may set up to handle a web hook. We’ll use the Ruby web framework Sinatra since it’s fairly concise and you should be able to easily see what we’re doing.

Let’s say we want to get an email if a specific person pushes to a specific branch of our project modifying a specific file. We could fairly easily do that with code like this: