Releasing Github Webhooks Extension

We're developing January, a comprehensive platform that enables you to build, integrate, test, and deploy APIs all in one place.Try it for free in the playground and have an API that you can share in seconds.

We're excited to announce GitHub Webhooks Extension, a new extension that allows you to trigger a workflow based on a event from a GitHub repositories directly in your January project.

With this extension, you can now:

Automatically respond to events like push commits, pull requests, and issues.
Easily set up and manage webhooks within your project.
Connect your workflows with real-time updates from your GitHub repositories.

What can you do with this extension?

Send notifications to your team when a new issue is created.
Maintaining public issue-tracking boards while managing comminucation internally.
Build community discussions boards that are powered by GitHub issues or GitHub discussions.

How does it work?

It uses Github Webhooks package to listen to events from a GitHub repository and broadcast them to the other parts of the project.

This package takes care of the low-level details of receiving and verifying webhook payloads from GitHub, and dispatching them to your code.

The setup looks similar to this:

const router = new Hono();

router.post('/github/webhooks', async (context, next) => {
  // ...
  const { processed, body, headers, statusCode } = await receiveGithubEvents(
    nodeContext.incoming,
    nodeContext.outgoing
  );
  // ...
});

export default ['/integrations', router] as const;

The listener part:

export function onGithubEvent<EventName extends EmitterWebhookEventName>(
  event: EventName,
  ...middlewares: ((
    event: EmitterWebhookEvent<EventName>
  ) => boolean | void | Promise<boolean | void>)[]
) {
  webhooks.on(event, async event => {
    for (const middleware of middlewares) {
      let canContinue = await middleware(event);
      if (canContinue === false) {
        break;
      }
    }
  });
}

A workflow that uses the extension would look like this:

// command file
export async function createPostWorkflowFromGithub({
  payload,
}: EmitterWebhookEvent<'issues.labeled'>) {
  const input = {
    title: payload.issue.title,
    description: payload.issue.body,
    issueUrl: payload.issue.url,
  };

  validateOrThrow(posts.createPostWorkflowFromGithubSchema, input);
  await posts.createPostWorkflowFromGithub(input);
}

// listener file
onGithubEvent('issues.labeled', listeners.createPostWorkflowFromGithub);

How I can use it?

Install the extension from within January.
Create webhooks in the GitHub repository.
Add the webhook secret as an environment variable in your project.
The rest of details can be found in the documentation.

There are two parts to this extension:

Triggers
Policies

A simple example of a workflow that listens to a issues.labeled event and creates a new record in a database:

feature('Roadmap', {
  workflows: [
    workflow('RecordIssuedLabeled', {
      tag: 'posts',
      trigger: trigger.github({
        event: 'issues.labeled',
      }),
      actions: {
        createIssue: action.database.insert({
          table: useTable('posts'),
          columns: [
            useField('title', '@trigger:issue.title'),
            useField('description', '@trigger:issue.body'),
            useField('issueUrl', '@trigger:issue.url'),
          ],
        }),
      },
    }),
  ],
  tables: {
    posts: table({
      fields: {
        title: field({ type: 'short-text' }),
        description: field({ type: 'long-text' }),
        issueUrl: field({ type: 'url' }),
      },
    }),
  },
});

Say, you only want to save the issue if it's labeled with bug:

feature('Roadmap', {
  policies: {
    isRoadmapIssue: policy.github<'issues.labeled'>(payload => {
      return payload.label?.name === 'bug';
    }),
  },
  workflows: [
    workflow('RecordIssuedLabeled', {
      tag: 'posts',
      trigger: trigger.github({
        event: 'issues.labeled',
        policies: ['isRoadmapIssue'],
      }),
      // ...
    }),
  ],
  tables: {
    // ...
  },
});

Get Involved

You can try it out today in the playground. We’re always happy to hear your feedback.

Looking to the future, January team is running a survey to gather info from the ecosystem to help shape the API development sphere. If you have a minute, please fill out the survey.

What's next?

Support for more than one webhook per project.
Listening to multiple events in a single workflow.
Add Github octokit to the extension to interact with the GitHub API.

We're gathering insights around API development and looking forward for your contribution in the survey.