How to run post-receive hook on GitHub

Question

how to run a post-receive hook in GitHub?. I know that there is the web-one but I want to write a custom script and do not want to receive a post from github.

Solution

The post-receive hook of Github are actually only "WebHooks", to communicate with a web server whenever the repository is pushed to.

For security reason, you cannot run anything on the GitHub server side.

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When a push is made to your repository, we'll POST to your URL with a payload of JSON-encoded data about the push and the commits it contained.

You can use Requestbin to test your webhooks.
(check that the JSON actually comes from GitHub though)

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Note: since late 2018, you can run actions on GitHub server-side, with GitHub Actions.

Actions are triggered by GitHub platform events directly in a repo and run on-demand workflows as autoscaled containers in response.
With GitHub Actions you can automate your workflow from idea to production.

See examples with sdras/awesome-actions.

Comments

[Greg Hewgill]

Well you can't run your own code on the Github servers. That is why Github provides the option to receive notifications by HTTP POST.

[Costa Michailidis]

I suppose if it did Circle CI and such wouldn't exist?