How to process a github webhook payload in Jenkins?
I'm currently triggering my Jenkins builds through a GitHub webhook. How would I parse the JSON payload? If I try to parameterize my build and use the $payload variable, the GitHub webhook fails with the following error:
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How can I get my GitHub webhook to work with a parameterized Jenkins build, and how could I then parse the webhook payload to use certain lines, such as the username of the committer, as conditionals in the build?
Answer
There are a few tricks to get this to work, and I found the (now defunct) chloky.com blog post to be helpful for most of it. Since it sounds like you've gotten the webhook communicating with your Jenkins instance at least, I'll skip over those steps for now. But, if you want more detail, just scroll past the end of my answer to see the content I was able to salvage from chloky.com - I do not know the original author and the information might be out of date but I did find it helpful.
So to summarize, you can do the following to deal with the payload:
- Set up a string parameter called "payload" in your Jenkins job. If you are planning on manually running the build, it might be a good idea to give it a default JSON document at some point but you don't need one right now. This parameter name appears to be case-sensitive (I'm using Linux so that's no surprise...)
Set up the webhook in github to use the buildWithParameters endpoint instead of the build endpoint, i.e.
http://<<yourserver>>/job/<<yourjob>>/buildWithParameters?token=<<yourtoken>>Configure your webhook to use application/x-www-form-encoded instead of application/json. The former approach packs the JSON data in a form variable called "payload", which is presumably how Jenkins can assign it to an environment variable. The application/json approach just POSTs raw JSON which does not seem to be mappable to anything (I couldn't get it to work). You can see the difference by pointing your webhook to something like requestbin and inspecting the results.
- At this point, you should get your $payload variable when you kick off the build. To parse the JSON, I highly recommend installing jq on your Jenkins server and try out some of the parsing syntax here. JQ is especially nice because it's cross-platform.
- From here, just parse what you need from the JSON into other environment variables. Combined with conditional build steps, this could give you a lot of flexibility.
Hope this helps!
EDIT here's what I could grab from the original blog posts at http://chloky.com/tag/jenkins/, which has been dead for a while.
Hopefully this content is also useful for someone.
Post #1 - July 2012
Github provides a nice way to fire off notifications to a CI system like jenkins whenever a commit is made against a repository. This is really useful for kicking off build jobs in jenkins to test the commits that were just made on the repo. You simply need to go to the administration section of the repository, click on service hooks on the left, click ‘webhook URLs’ at the top of the list, and then enter the URL of the webhook that jenkins is expecting (look at this jenkins plugin for setting up jenkins to receive these hooks from github).
Recently though, I was looking for a way to make a webhook fire when a pull request is made against a repo, rather than when a commit is made to the repo. This is so that we could have jenkins run a bunch of tests on the pull request, before deciding whether to merge the pull request in – useful for when you have a lot of developers working on their own forks and regularly submitting pull requests to the main repo.
It turns out that this is not as obvious as one would hope, and requires a bit of messing about with the github API.
By default, when you configure a github webhook, it is configured to only fire when a commit is made against a repo. There is no easy way to see, or change, this in the github web interface when you set up the webhook. In order to manipulate the webhook in any way, you need to use the API.
To make changes on a repo via the github API, we need to authorize ourselves. We’re going to use curl, so if we wanted to we could pass our username and password each time, like this:
# curl https://api.github.com/users/mancdaz --user 'mancdaz'
Enter host password for user 'mancdaz':
Or, and this is a much better option if you want to script any of this stuff, we can grab an oauth token and use it in subsequent requests to save having to keep entering our password. This is what we’re going to do in our example. First we need to create an oauth authorization and grab the token:
curl https://api.github.com/authorizations --user "mancdaz" \
--data '{"scopes":["repo"]}' -X POST
You will be returned something like the following:
{
"app":{
"name":"GitHub API",
"url":"http://developer.github.com/v3/oauth/#oauth-authorizations-api"
},
"token":"b2067d190ab94698a592878075d59bb13e4f5e96",
"scopes":[
"repo"
],
"created_at":"2012-07-12T12:55:26Z",
"updated_at":"2012-07-12T12:55:26Z",
"note_url":null,
"note":null,
"id":498182,
"url":"https://api.github.com/authorizations/498182"
}
Now we can use this token in subsequent requests for manipulating our github account via the API. So let’s query our repo and find the webhook we set up in the web interface earlier:
# curl https://api.github.com/repos/mancdaz/mygithubrepo/hooks?access_token=b2067d190ab94698592878075d59bb13e4f5e96
[
{
"created_at": "2012-07-12T11:18:16Z",
"updated_at": "2012-07-12T11:18:16Z",
"events": [
"push"
],
"last_response": {
"status": "unused",
"message": null,
"code": null
},
"name": "web",
"config": {
"insecure_ssl": "1",
"content_type": "form",
"url": "http://jenkins-server.chloky.com/post-hook"
},
"id": 341673,
"active": true,
"url": "https://api.github.com/repos/mancdaz/mygithubrepo/hooks/341673"
}
]
Note the important bit from that json output:
"events": [
"push"
]
This basically says that this webhook will only trigger when a commit (push) is made to the repo. The github API documentation describes numerous different event types that can be added to this list – for our purposes we want to add pull_request, and this is how we do it (note that we get the id of the webhook from the json output above. If you have multiple hooks defined, your output will contain all these hooks so be sure to get the right ID):
# curl https://api.github.com/repos/mancdaz/mygithubrepo/hooks/341673?access_token=b2067d190ab94698592878075d59bb13e4f5e96 -X PATCH --data '{"events": ["push", "pull_request"]}'
{
"created_at": "2012-07-12T11:18:16Z",
"updated_at": "2012-07-12T16:03:21Z",
"last_response": {
"status": "unused",
"message": null,
"code": null
},
"events": [
"push",
"pull_request"
],
"name": "web",
"config": {
"insecure_ssl": "1",
"content_type": "form",
"url": "http://jenkins-server.chloky.com/post-hook"
},
"id": 341673,
"active": true,
"url": "https://api.github.com/repos/mancdaz/mygithubrepo/hooks/341673"
}
See!
"events": [
"push",
"pull_request"
],
This webhook will now trigger whenever either a commit OR a pull request is made against our repo. Exactly what you do in your jenkins/with this webhook is up to you. We use it to kick off a bunch of integration tests in jenkins to test the proposed patch, and then actually merge and close (again using the API) the pull request automatically. Pretty sweet.
Post #2 - September 2012
In an earlier post, I talked about configuring the github webhook to fire on a pull request, rather than just a commit. As mentioned, there are many events that happen on a github repo, and as per the github documentation, a lot of these can be used to trigger the webhook.
Regardless of what event you decide to trigger on, when the webhook fires from github, it essentially makes a POST to the URL configured in the webhook, including a json payload in the body. The json payload contains various details about the event that caused the webhook to fire. An example payload that fired on a simple commit can be seen here:
payload
{
"after":"c04a2b2af96a5331bbee0f11fe12965902f5f571",
"before":"78d414a69db29cdd790659924eb9b27baac67f60",
"commits":[
{
"added":[
"afile"
],
"author":{
"email":"[email protected]",
"name":"Darren Birkett",
"username":"mancdaz"
},
"committer":{
"email":"[email protected]",
"name":"Darren Birkett",
"username":"mancdaz"
},
"distinct":true,
"id":"c04a2b2af96a5331bbee0f11fe12965902f5f571",
"message":"adding afile",
"modified":[
],
"removed":[
],
"timestamp":"2012-09-03T02:35:59-07:00",
"url":"https://github.com/mancdaz/mygithubrepo/commit/c04a2b2af96a5331bbee0f11fe12965902f5f571"
}
],
"compare":"https://github.com/mancdaz/mygithubrepo/compare/78d414a69db2...c04a2b2af96a",
"created":false,
"deleted":false,
"forced":false,
"head_commit":{
"added":[
"afile"
],
"author":{
"email":"[email protected]",
"name":"Darren Birkett",
"username":"mancdaz"
},
"committer":{
"email":"[email protected]",
"name":"Darren Birkett",
"username":"mancdaz"
},
"distinct":true,
"id":"c04a2b2af96a5331bbee0f11fe12965902f5f571",
"message":"adding afile",
"modified":[
],
"removed":[
],
"timestamp":"2012-09-03T02:35:59-07:00",
"url":"https://github.com/mancdaz/mygithubrepo/commit/c04a2b2af96a5331bbee0f11fe12965902f5f571"
},
"pusher":{
"email":"[email protected]",
"name":"mancdaz"
},
"ref":"refs/heads/master",
"repository":{
"created_at":"2012-07-12T04:17:51-07:00",
"description":"",
"fork":false,
"forks":1,
"has_downloads":true,
"has_issues":true,
"has_wiki":true,
"name":"mygithubrepo",
"open_issues":0,
"owner":{
"email":"[email protected]",
"name":"mancdaz"
},
"private":false,
"pushed_at":"2012-09-03T02:36:06-07:00",
"size":124,
"stargazers":1,
"url":"https://github.com/mancdaz/mygithubrepo",
"watchers":1
}
}
This entire payload gets passed in the POST requests as a single parameter, with the imaginative title payload. It contains a ton of information about the event that just happened, all or any of which can be used by jenkins when we build jobs after the trigger. In order to use this payload in Jenkins, we have a couple of options. I discuss one below.
Getting the $payload
In jenkins, when creating a new build job, we have the option of specifying the names of parameters that we expect to pass to the job in the POST that triggers the build. In this case, we would pass a single parameter payload, as seen here:
Passing parameters to a jenkins build job
Further down in the job configuration, we can specify that we would like to be able to trigger the build remotely (ie. that we want to allow github to trigger the build by posting to our URL with the payload):
Then, when we set up the webhook in our github repo (as described in the first post), we give it the URL that jenkins tells us to:
You can’t see it all in the screencap, but the URL I specified for the webhook was the one that jenkins told me to:
http://jenkins-server.chloky.com:8080/job/mytestbuild//buildWithParameters?token=asecuretoken
Now, when I built my new job in jenkins, for the purposes of this test I simply told it to echo out the contents of the ‘payload’ parameter (which is available in paramterized builds as a shell variable of the same name), using a simple script:
#!/bin/bash
echo "the build worked! The payload is $payload"
Now to test the whole thing we simply have to make a commit to our repo, and then pop over to jenkins to look at the job that was triggered:
mancdaz@chloky$ (git::master)$ touch myfile
mancdaz@chloky$ (git::master) git add myfile
mancdaz@chloky$ (git::master) git commit -m 'added my file'
[master 4810490] added my file
0 files changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
create mode 100644 myfile
mancdaz@chloky$ (git::master) git push
Counting objects: 3, done.
Delta compression using up to 8 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (2/2), done.
Writing objects: 100% (2/2), 232 bytes, done.
Total 2 (delta 1), reused 0 (delta 0)
To [email protected]:mancdaz/mygithubrepo.git
c7ecafa..4810490 master -> master
And over in our jenkins server, we can look at the console output of the job that was triggered, and lo and behold there is our ‘payload’ contained in the $payload variable and available for us to consume:
So great, all the info about our github event is here. and fully available in our jenkins job! True enough, it’s in a big json blob, but with a bit of crafty bash you should be good to go.
Of course, this example used a simple commit to demonstrate the principles of getting at the payload inside jenkins. As we discussed in the earlier post, a commit is one of many events on a repo that can trigger a webhook. What you do inside jenkins once you’ve triggered is up to you, but the real fun comes when you start interacting with github to take further actions on the repo (post comments, merge pull requests, reject commits etc) based on the results of your build jobs that got triggered by the initial event.
Look out for a subsequent post where I tie it all together and show you how to process, run tests for, and finally merge a pull request if successful – all automatically inside jenkins. Automation is fun!