Simulate receiving webhooks

As you are developing your app, you will likely want to test it by repeatedly triggering the same webhook. You can simulate a webhook being delivered by saving the payload to a file, and then calling probot receive from the command line.

To save a copy of the payload, go to the settings page for your App, and go to the Advanced tab. Click on one of the Recent Deliveries to expand it and see the details of the webhook event. Copy the JSON from the Payload and save it to a new file. (test/fixtures/issues.labeled.json in this example).

Note: This will only receive the JSON payload, not the headers that are also sent by GitHub webhooks.

Next, simulate receiving this event being delivered by running:

$ node_modules/.bin/probot receive -e <event-name> -p <path-to-fixture> <path-to-app>

Note that event-name here is just the name of the event (like pull_request or issues) and not the action (like labeled). You can find it in the GitHub deliveries history under the X-GitHub-Event header.

For example, to simulate receiving the pull_request.labeled event, run:

$ node_modules/.bin/probot receive -e pull_request -p test/fixtures/pull_request.labeled.json ./index.js