Repository webhooks

Webhook for manually telling Sourcegraph to update a repository

By default, Sourcegraph polls code hosts to keep repository contents up to date. It uses intelligent heuristics like average update frequency to determine the polling frequency per repository.

Polling, however, falls short in cases where immediate updates are desired or when the number of repositories causes significant load on the code host.

To address this, there is a repository update webhook that triggers a repository update on Sourcegraph. The webhook is authenticated using access tokens (which you can create at e.g. https://sourcegraph.example.com/site-admin/tokens).

Here's an example using curl.

curl -XPOST -H 'Authorization: token $ACCESS_TOKEN' $SOURCEGRAPH_ORIGIN/.api/repos/$REPO_NAME/-/refresh

Disabling built-in repo updating

Sourcegraph will periodically ask your code-host to list its repositories (e.g. via its HTTP API) to discover repositories. You can control how often this occurs by changing repoListUpdateInterval in the site config.

For repositories that Sourcegraph is already aware of, it will periodically perform background Git repository updates. You can disable this if you wish by setting disableAutoGitUpdates to true. In which case, the repository will only update when the webhook is used or, e.g., if a user visits the repository directly. This may be desirable in cases where you wish to rely solely on the repository update webhook, for example.