---
title: "Receive GitHub Webhooks Locally | WebhookRelay"
meta:
  "og:description": "Receive GitHub webhooks locally and test them on localhost without deploying. Inspect the real payload, forward to your handler, and verify the signature."
  "og:title": "Receive GitHub Webhooks Locally"
  description: "Receive GitHub webhooks locally and test them on localhost without deploying. Inspect the real payload, forward to your handler, and verify the signature."
---

![Stripes](https://webhookrelay.com/blog/receive-github-webhooks-locally/images/stripes.svg)

# **Receive GitHub Webhooks Locally**

Receive GitHub webhooks locally and test them on localhost without deploying. Inspect the real payload, forward to your handler, and verify the signature.

![Receive GitHub Webhooks Locally (Test GitHub Webhooks on localhost)](https://webhookrelay.com/blog/receive-github-webhooks-locally/images/blog/heroes/localhost.jpg)

You are building a GitHub integration — a bot, a CI trigger, a deploy hook — and you need to see your handler react to a real `push` or `pull_request` event. The problem is immediate: GitHub will only POST to a **public URL**, and your handler is running on `localhost:8080`. GitHub has no way to reach it.

The usual workarounds are painful. Deploying to a staging server for every code change is slow. Pasting payloads from the docs into curl gives you a _guess_ at the real request, not the real headers and body GitHub actually sends. What you want is to **receive GitHub webhooks locally** — real events, hitting your local handler, with a URL that does not change every time you restart.

This guide shows how to do exactly that.

## [Why receiving GitHub webhooks locally is tricky](#why-receiving-github-webhooks-locally-is-tricky)

A webhook is just an HTTP request that GitHub sends to a URL when something happens in your repo. GitHub sits on the public internet; your dev machine usually does not. It is behind a router, a corporate firewall, or both, with no public IP and no inbound ports open.

So you need something in the middle: a public endpoint GitHub can hit, that relays each request down to your laptop without you opening a single firewall port. That is what [Webhook Relay](https://my.webhookrelay.com/register) does — and unlike a random tunnel URL, the endpoint is **stable**, so you configure GitHub once and never touch it again.

## [Step 1: Inspect the real payload with Webhook Bin](#step-1-inspect-the-real-payload-with-webhook-bin)

Before you write any handler code, find out what GitHub actually sends. Open the free [Webhook Bin](https://webhookrelay.com/blog/receive-github-webhooks-locally/webhook-bin/) — no signup — and you get an instant public URL.

1. Copy the Webhook Bin URL.
2. In your repository, go to **Settings → Webhooks → Add webhook**.
3. Paste the URL into **Payload URL**, set **Content type** to `application/json`, and choose the events you care about (or "Send me everything").
4. Click **Add webhook**.

GitHub immediately fires a `ping` event to confirm the endpoint works — you will see it land in Webhook Bin right away. Trigger a real action (push a commit, open a pull request) and inspect the captured request: the full JSON body, the query string, and every header, including `X-GitHub-Event`, `X-GitHub-Delivery`, and `X-Hub-Signature-256`.

Now you know the exact shape of the data before writing a line of code. For more on this approach, see [How to test webhooks](https://webhookrelay.com/blog/receive-github-webhooks-locally/blog/how-to-test-webhooks/) and [What is a webhook](https://webhookrelay.com/blog/receive-github-webhooks-locally/blog/what-is-webhook/).

## [Step 2: Forward the events to localhost with the relay agent](#step-2-forward-the-events-to-localhost-with-the-relay-agent)

Once you know the payload, route those same events into your local handler. [Sign up for Webhook Relay](https://my.webhookrelay.com/register), install the `relay` agent (CLI or Docker), and create a bucket — say `github`. The bucket gives you a stable public input endpoint.

Start forwarding to your local server:

```
relay forward --bucket github http://localhost:8080/webhook
```

The agent opens an **outbound** connection to Webhook Relay and streams every incoming request down to `http://localhost:8080/webhook`. Because the connection is outbound, there are **no firewall ports to open and no public IP needed** — this works from your laptop, behind a corporate proxy, or inside a Kubernetes cluster. Running in Docker? The same command works in the official `webhookrelay/webhookrelayd` image. Full details are in the [localhost forwarding docs](https://webhookrelay.com/blog/receive-github-webhooks-locally/docs/webhooks/internal/localhost/).

Now update the GitHub webhook's **Payload URL** to your Webhook Relay endpoint (or just create it there from the start). Push a commit and watch it arrive on `localhost`.

## [GitHub-specific configuration and quirks](#github-specific-configuration-and-quirks)

A few GitHub details worth knowing:

- **Where to add it:** repository **Settings → Webhooks** for a single repo, or **organization Settings → Webhooks** to cover every repo in the org.
- **Content type:** use `application/json` so the body is raw JSON. (The alternative, `application/x-www-form-urlencoded`, wraps the JSON inside a `payload` form field — easy to trip over.)
- **Events:** pick individual events (push, pull_request, issues, release, …) or choose "Send me everything." Use the `X-GitHub-Event` header to branch in your handler.
- **The ping event:** GitHub sends a `ping` the moment you create the webhook. It is a great sanity check that the endpoint is reachable.
- **Redeliver:** under **Settings → Webhooks → Recent Deliveries**, every past delivery can be **re-sent** with the original payload and headers. This is the single most useful feature for local development — keep your `relay forward` running and replay a real delivery as many times as you need.

## [Step 3: Verify the GitHub webhook signature](#step-3-verify-the-github-webhook-signature)

If you set a **Secret** on the webhook, GitHub signs each request. It computes an HMAC-SHA256 of the raw request body using your secret and sends the digest in the **`X-Hub-Signature-256`** header (formatted as `sha256=...`). Your handler should recompute the HMAC over the **raw** body and compare in constant time before trusting the payload.

To sanity-check your implementation, paste a captured body, your secret, and the received signature into the free [HMAC signature verifier](https://webhookrelay.com/blog/receive-github-webhooks-locally/hmac-verification/). For language-specific code and the common pitfalls (reading the body after a JSON parser has consumed it, timing-safe comparison), read [Verify a webhook signature](https://webhookrelay.com/blog/receive-github-webhooks-locally/blog/verify-webhook-signature/).

## [Replay and iterate](#replay-and-iterate)

This is where local development gets fast:

- **Replay from GitHub** via the **Redeliver** button to re-run a real delivery against your handler.
- **Replay from Webhook Relay** — past requests are stored on your bucket, so you can resend a captured event without touching GitHub at all.
- **Iterate on your handler** by editing code and replaying the same delivery until it behaves correctly. No commits, no pushes, no deploys just to test a code path.

Because the Webhook Relay endpoint is stable, you can stop and restart the agent, reboot your machine, or come back next week — the GitHub configuration never needs to change.

## [Get started](#get-started)

1. Inspect the real payload in the free [Webhook Bin](https://webhookrelay.com/blog/receive-github-webhooks-locally/webhook-bin/) — no signup needed.
2. [Create a Webhook Relay account](https://my.webhookrelay.com/register), install the agent, and run `relay forward --bucket github http://localhost:8080/webhook`.
3. Point your GitHub webhook at the stable endpoint, trigger an event, and watch it hit `localhost`.

You will be testing real GitHub events against your local handler in a few minutes — no deploys, no open firewall ports, and a URL you configure exactly once.