Often I need to make things to happen in a GitHub Action by calling out to an external service. For example, I want to rebuild a website with a Netlify build hook or a Vercel deploy hook.

While you could write a bash script that executes a curl command, I find it much easier to use the webhook-action by Joel Male. Include it in a workflow step with the uses key, and add inputs under the with key to specify details about the HTTP request.

jobs:
    webhook:
        name: "☎️ call webhook"
        runs-on: ubuntu-latest
        steps:
            - name: "🎣 webhook"
              uses: joelwmale/webhook-action@2.1.0
              with:
                  url: https://example.com/api/webhook
                  body: '{"name": "Brad"}'
                  headers: '{"authorization": "abc123"}'

I did run into one snag though. The body and headers fields have to be proper json, which means the keys and values should be wrapped in double quotes. If you're trying to use a secret in your workflow, they cannot be inside of single quotes. That's because bash preserves the literal values of characters within single quotes. In order to get this working, I had to disable prettier and escape the double quotes.

# prettier-ignore
headers: "{\"authorization\": \"${{secrets.TOKEN}}\"}"