This is a demo webhook endpoint (server) for lesson A307 of the Mastering Advanced GitHub video series at O’Reilly.

1. Make sure you have Node.js installed
2. Clone this repo
3. Open a Terminal and cd into the clone's directory
4. Run npm install to get the (few) dependencies
5. Run npm start to run the server

This will run the server on a random available port of your machine, which will change just about every time. It will look something like this:

> [email protected] start …/oreilly-github-webhook-endpoint
> node server.js

Demo webhook endpoint listening on port 53770

But this is just on your machine, and you need GitHub’s servers to be able to access it. For this, you need some sort of tunnel that connects some network port and address visible to the internet to your own machine and port. One of the easiest ways to accomplish that across environments and setups is ngrok.

1. Download ngrok
2. Make a note of the port your webhook endpoint ran on; for these instructions, we'll assume it was 53770
3. Open another Terminal window, and run ngrok http <the-port>, for instance ngrok http 53770.

This will clear the window and run an ngrok client on your machine, acting as a sort of reverse-proxy so the internet can access your server, both over HTTPS and HTTP. After a second or two, you should see something that looks like this:

Tunnel Status                 online
Version                       2.0.19/2.0.19
Web Interface                 127.0.0.1:4040
Forwarding                    http://1420f0d6.ngrok.com -> localhost:53770
Forwarding                    https://1420f0d6.ngrok.com -> localhost:53770

Connections                   ttl     opn     rt1     rt5     p50     p90
                              0       0       0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00

Until you stop ngrok by hitting Ctrl+C, you've got your tunnel running. You can now configure your Webhook to use the public URL based off ngrok.com, and this webhook server will dump the JSON payloads GitHub sends into its own Terminal console.

This repo © 2016 Christophe Porteneuve & Delicious Insights, and is MIT licensed.