github-webhooks

A guide for connecting an application to GitHub, a service for hosting and collaborating on code, through webhook notifications. It explains how to verify GitHub’s signed requests.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for push, pull request, issue, and release handlers.
Why use it?
It helps prevent forged repository notifications and avoids common mistakes involving the request body or older signature formats.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/hookdeck/webhook-skills/github-webhooks
Any agent
npx skills add hookdeck/webhook-skills --skill github-webhooks
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/hookdeck/webhook-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 40 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,446 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 81% copy Near-identical to another mod in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00040 $0.01446
Opus 5 $0.00020 $0.00723
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00289
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00145

Measured 2d ago against content hash 3bd595dfb116, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

github-webhooks scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 7 executable files (examples/express/src/index.js, examples/express/test/webhook.test.js, examples/fastapi/main.py, …), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

This is a copy

81% identical to adyen-webhooks — 163 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

skills/github-webhooks/SKILL.md · 132 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 132 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

GitHub Webhooks

When to Use This Skill

  • Setting up GitHub webhook handlers
  • Debugging signature verification failures
  • Understanding GitHub event types and payloads
  • Handling push, pull request, or issue events

Verification (core)

GitHub signs the raw body with HMAC-SHA256 keyed on your webhook secret and sends the digest in X-Hub-Signature-256 formatted as sha256=<hex>. Use X-Hub-Signature-256 (not the legacy SHA-1 X-Hub-Signature), pass the raw body, and compare timing-safe.

Node:

const crypto = require('crypto');

function verify(rawBody, signatureHeader, secret) {
  const [algo, sig] = (signatureHeader || '').split('=');
  if (algo !== 'sha256' || !sig) return false;
  const expected = crypto.createHmac('sha256', secret).update(rawBody).digest('hex');
  try {
    return crypto.timingSafeEqual(Buffer.from(sig), Buffer.from(expected));
  } catch {
    return false;
  }
}

Python:

import hmac, hashlib

def verify(raw_body: bytes, signature_header: str, secret: str) -> bool:
    algo, _, sig = (signature_header or "").partition("=")
    if algo != "sha256" or not sig:
        return False
    expected = hmac.new(secret.encode(), raw_body, hashlib.sha256).hexdigest()
    return hmac.compare_digest(sig, expected)

For complete handlers with route wiring, event dispatch, and tests, see:

Common Event Types

Event Description
push Commits pushed to branch
pull_request PR opened, closed, merged, etc.
issues Issue opened, closed, labeled, etc.
release Release published
workflow_run GitHub Actions workflow completed
ping Test event when webhook created

For full event reference, see GitHub Webhook Events

Important Headers

Header Description
X-Hub-Signature-256 HMAC SHA-256 signature (use this, not sha1)
X-GitHub-Event Event type (push, pull_request, etc.)
X-GitHub-Delivery Unique delivery ID

Read the full file on GitHub · 132 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 132 lines · 40 tokens per session scan A 3bd595dfb116

Subscribe to this mod's changes

github-webhooks is a skill published in the GitHub repository hookdeck/webhook-skills (83 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 40 tokens to every session and 1,446 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 81% identical to adyen-webhooks, differing in 163 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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