Receiving webhooks

GitHub webhooks are fired for almost every significant action that users or other apps take on GitHub, whether it's pushing to code, opening or closing issues, opening or merging pull requests, or commenting on a discussion.

Many apps will spend their entire day responding to these actions. app.on will listen for any GitHub webhook events:

export default (app) => {
  app.on("push", async (context) => {
    // Code was pushed to the repo, what should we do with it?
    app.log.info(context);
  });
};

The app can listen to any of the GitHub webhook events. The context object includes everything about the event that was triggered, and context.payload has the payload delivered by GitHub.

Most events also include an "action". For example, the issues event has actions of assigned, unassigned, labeled, unlabeled, opened, edited, milestoned, demilestoned, closed, and reopened. Often, your app will only care about one type of action, so you can append it to the event name with a .:

export default (app) => {
  app.on("issues.opened", async (context) => {
    // An issue was just opened.
  });
};

Sometimes you want to handle multiple webhook events the same way. app.on can listen to a list of events and run the same callback:

export default (app) => {
  app.on(["issues.opened", "issues.edited"], async (context) => {
    // An issue was opened or edited, what should we do with it?
    app.log.info(context);
  });
};

You can also use app.onAny() to listen for any event that your app is subscribed to:

export default (app) => {
  app.onAny(async (context) => {
    app.log.info({ event: context.name, action: context.payload.action });
  });
};

For more details, explore the GitHub webhook documentation or see a list of all the named events in the @octokit/webhooks.js npm module.

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