Create webhooks with GitHub API

This code example takes in a file with a list of GitHub repositories and uses a config.py file containing the required credentials, org, and so on, to either list or create webhooks in each repo.

To use these scripts, clone this repository locally. These scripts have been tested with Python 3.8.

Credentials

You'll need to create a personal access token using the instructions at https://docs.github.com/en/github/authenticating-to-github/creating-a-personal-access-token. Treat this token as you would a password and only give it the minimum permissions needed for the automation tasks.

• To run against an org, you must have the admin:org scope for the token.

Config file

gh_username = "username"
gh_api_key = "9d1f1dcf---c58b5032a" # Create from Settings > Profile > Developer settings > Personal access token, scope should be admin:repo_hook
gh_orgname = "organizationname"
gh_secret = "d954a2----dde787" # This value is inserted in the payload for creating a webhook that requires a secret

File containing list of repositories

Create a text file with one repo name per line, and be sure not to add an extra new line at the end of the file. If you have an extra new line, the script will return with "Not Found" for the last "repo name" in the file.

In this repository example, we have a Python script that can read in a JSON file and output a list of repository names by extracting the data from the JSON file. The JSON file is made from an internal-to-Cisco API endpoint used for publishing to https://developer.cisco.com/learning/.

Webhook Payload

In this example, the payload is modeled after the GitHub v3 REST API documentation for webhooks at: https://docs.github.com/en/rest/reference/repos#create-a-repository-webhook.

In this case, the webhook URL is an internal-to-Cisco webhook URL made available for this use case. You would substitute in the URL for your webhook.

This webhook also requires a secret, so that secret is stored in a config.py file when you run the script. That config.py file is in the .gitignore file so that this public repo will not reveal the secret.

{
               'name': 'web',
               'active': True,
               'events': ['release'],
               'config': {
                           'url': 'https://devnet-int-svcs.cisco.com/api/githubs/githubWebhook/release',
                           'content_type': 'json',
                           'secret': '{}'.format(gh_secret),
                           'insecure_ssl': '0'
                           }
               }

More details about the possible events you can trigger the webhook on, what the other config settings mean, can be found in these documents: https://developer.github.com/webhooks/event-payloads/.

Usage

Once you have your config file and a list of repositories in a text file, you can run the script like so:

python create_webhook.py repolist.txt

Contributing

Contributions are welcome, refer to the CONTRIBUTING file for more information.