Webhook Workshop

Editing a webhook in Gitpod

Inspiration

At The Adaptavist Group, we have started to make use of a recently installed self-hosted GitLab, and many teams are looking to migrate from other git, CI/CD, and issue tracking systems into it.

Talking to my colleagues, a major concern seemed to be being able to customize their workflow, and integrate other apps with GitLab via webhook events. It seems that a major barrier to this was the faff required to develop, test and deploy such webhooks.

What it does

The codebase is a simple webserver that provides webhook endpoints, but the focus of this project is to improve the developer experience, making the workflow around the code quick, easy, and painless.

We bring together the latest best of breed technologies into an environment for getting started quickly on the webhook development and deployment lifecycle, without limiting future flexibility.

Gitpod provides an environment to edit your webhook code and run a development server with a public URL (essential for webhook testing), giving a realtime development cycle experience, and avoid the faff of setting up a tunnel.
Deno provides a modern Typescript runtime that avoids the large initial download of packages, and incorporates all the tooling (ie. formatting, linting, type checking, task running, testing) you need.
Deno Deploy provides a cloud edge hosting solution with a very simple deployment mechanism, and support for a transactional distributed key-value store, queueing, and scheduling out of the box, without having to provision additional services.
GitLab itself provides the git repo hosting for your webhook codebase, and CI/CD to test and deploy them to Deno Deploy.

The intention is that you should fork this project, and use it as a template from which to create your own webhooks. It contains a number of example webhooks, including a hook to create an issue on a pipeline failure and use an OpenAI LLM to summarise the reason and suggest a remedy.

How we built it

The development was all done within the environment itself, using Gitpod, with VSCode in a browser, and hosting the code on our internal GitLab, before moving it over to the public gitlab.com.

Challenges we ran into

Surprisingly few thanks to the quality of the technologies used.

The greatest challenge was the short time frame, we didn't start until about 2 weeks before the deadline.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Turning around this idea so quickly.

What we learned

Start sooner :D

What's next for Webhook Workshop

More example webhooks
Improve documentation
Streamling the getting started process wherever possible
More helper functions to make webhook coding much easier
Alternative deployment options
Declarative webhook registration - avoiding having to manually configure the webhooks in the GitLab UI.