# Auto-pull GitHub repo via Webhook on VPS

Webhooks are automated messages sent when something happens. Certain actions performed on a GitHub repo like push, pull request, star, etc. can trigger a webhook i.e. send a message about the occurred event.

My portfolio and resume are hosted on my VPS, every time I made some changes in my resume latex, I had to manually login into the server and update the PDF.

To automate this, I set up a GitHub action that compiles my updated Latex into PDF and commits the PDF into the repo.

Now to auto-fetch the new PDF on the server, I wrote an Express API in TypeScript that takes a pull of the repo.

Following is its code

```typescript
import express, {Application, Request, Response, NextFunction} from 'express';
import {resolve} from 'node:path';
import {execSync} from 'child_process';

//Express App
const app: Application = express();

//Webhook endpoint.
//Get's triggered by GitHub webhook
app.post('/',(req: Request,res: Response)=>{

    cloneRepo();

    res.send('Pulled the repo');
})

//Server listening on port 5000
app.listen(5000, ()=>{
    console.log("Server Running on port 5000");
})

//Function to execute the git pull shell command
const cloneRepo = ()=>{
    execSync('git pull origin main', {
        stdio: [0, 1, 2], 
        cwd: resolve(__dirname, '../../resume-files'),
      })
}
```

The API gets triggered by GitHub when a push is made to my repo and it executes a shell command that pulls the changes from the source repo.

The snippet can be customized to perform any action.

Started it in the background using [PM2](https://www.npmjs.com/package/pm2) and it works perfectly.

**Note:** I've used NGINX as a reverse proxy to expose the API to the internet.