How to Auto-Deploy Source Code to Web Server via Webhook
If you are using GitHub to manage your website source code, you can use webhooks to send GitHub events to external services. In this article, I will share how to deploy my website to IIS, as well as how to pull the source code and update the site automatically when there’s a push event triggered.
IIS Configuration in Windows 10
Open “Windows features” to activate IIS. By default, all of the “Application Development Features” are disabled. Select the required features.
How to Use Visual C# to Handle HTTP Request
Create an empty ASP.NET web application in Visual Studio.
Add an HTML file index.htm.
Add a generic handler Webhook.ashx.
Publish the project.
Select IIS > File System.
Launch IIS to add the website.
Visit http://localhost/Webhook.ashx to check whether the URL can work in your web browser.
The next step is to run the git pull command in C#. We can refer to the sample code from CodeProject.
I created a batch file for running relevant commands:
batchFile = Path.Combine(context.Server.MapPath("."), "github.bat");
objThread.Start(batchFile);
The physical path of my project is d:\iis, so the github.bat is as follows:
d:
cd d:\\iis
git pull
How to Expose the Local Web Server to the Internet
To use GitHub webhooks, we have to provide a valid URL. Ngrok is a good tool for exposing a local webserver to the internet.
ngrok http 80
The webhook URL is now https://048dab0c.ngrok.io/Webhook.ashx.
How to Use GitHub Webhook to Trigger the Auto-Deployment
Once the URL is ready, we can create a new repository on GitHub.
Add and push d:\iis to the remote repository.
Click Settings > Webhooks to add the payload URL:
Clone the repository to a new folder or another PC. Do some changes to the index.html file and push the changes to GitHub.
The web server will receive an HTTP request instantly and execute the `git pull’ command.
Refresh the page https://048dab0c.ngrok.io/ to see the update.