How do I receive Github Webhooks in Python

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("https://stackoverflow.com/",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 -