How do I receive Github Webhooks in Python

Question

Github offers to send Post-receive hooks to an URL of your choice when there's activity on your repo. I want to write a small Python command-line/background (i.e. no GUI or webapp) application running on my computer (later on a NAS), which continually listens for those incoming POST requests, and once a POST is received from Github, it processes the JSON information contained within. Processing the json as soon as I have it is no problem. The POST can come from a small number of IPs given by github; I plan/hope to specify a port on my computer where it should get sent.

The problem is, I don't know enough about web technologies to deal with the vast number of options you find when searching.. do I use Django, Requests, sockets,Flask, microframeworks...? I don't know what most of the terms involved mean, and most sound like they offer too much/are too big to solve my problem - I'm simply overwhelmed and don't know where to start.

Most tutorials about POST/GET I could find seem to be concerned with either sending or directly requesting data from a website, but not with continually listening for it.

I feel the problem is not really a difficult one, and will boil down to a couple of lines, once I know where to go/how to do it. Can anybody offer pointers/tutorials/examples/sample code?

Answer 1

First thing is, web is request-response based. So something will request your link, and you will respond accordingly. Your server application will be continuously listening on a port; that you don't have to worry about.

Here is the similar version in Flask (my micro framework of choice):

from flask import Flask, request
import json

app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route('/',methods=['POST'])
def foo():
   data = json.loads(request.data)
   print "New commit by: {}".format(data['commits'][0]['author']['name'])
   return "OK"

if __name__ == '__main__':
   app.run()

Here is a sample run, using the example from github:

Running the server (the above code is saved in sample.py):

burhan@lenux:~$ python sample.py 
 * Running on http://127.0.0.1:5000/

Here is a request to the server, basically what github will do:

burhan@lenux:~$ http POST http://127.0.0.1:5000 < sample.json
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Content-Length: 2
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Date: Sun, 27 Jan 2013 19:07:56 GMT
Server: Werkzeug/0.8.3 Python/2.7.3

OK # <-- this is the response the client gets

Here is the output at the server:

New commit by: Chris Wanstrath
127.0.0.1 - - [27/Jan/2013 22:07:56] "POST / HTTP/1.1" 200 -