Jekyll Github Hook

There are a few scripts online that will launch a script when a Github Webhook is activated. I found that Hookshot was the simplest and most customizable way to do what I wanted. It is a simple library that will handle

Setting up the Webhook

npm install -g hookshot

It can be used to execute scripts or commands when a specific branch in a repository is pushed to, in this example port 8080 is where the github hook is sent to.

hookshot -p 8080 -r refs/heads/master 'path_to_custom_script.sh'

Hookshot can also be configured to run using forever by using the js interface:

//hookshot.js:
#!/usr/bin/env node
var hookshot = require('hookshot');
hookshot('refs/heads/master', 'path_to_custom_script.sh').listen(8080)

forever start hookshot.js

If you want this command to run on reboot (if your server restarts for some reason) add the following to your crontab

crontab -e

@reboot cd /path/to/script forever hookshot.js

If using nginx you can set up your config to send the webhook to a specific port. This makes it easy to set up multiple hooks to different addresses/ports and have multiple instances of hookshor listening to different ports.

server {
        listen  [::]:80;
        listen  80;
        server_name     hooks.website.org;

        location / {
                proxy_pass	 http://localhost:8080;
                proxy_set_header Host	   $host;
                proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        }
}

and then under github set the url to

http://hooks.website.org

Running Jekyll

Once the webhook has activated hookshot will run whatever script we provide. In this case we could do something like:

#!/bin/bash
cd /path/to/repo/
git pull
jekyll build -s /path/to/source -d /path/to/destination