monalisten 0.2.0

Monalisten is an async library for handling GitHub webhook events in an easy way

Monalisten

Monalisten is a Python 3.9+ asynchronous library that helps you handle webhook events received from GitHub in an easy way. It is built on top of the amazing githubkit and httpx libraries and relies on SSE (with httpx-sse) to stream events without exposing any endpoints.

• Installation
• Usage
  • Foreword on how this works
  • Basic example
  • One event, multiple hooks
  • One hook, multiple events
  • Wildcard hooks
  • Internal events
  • API reference
  • GitHub event type reference
  • monalisten.types reference
• License

Installation

monalisten is available on PyPI and can be installed with any package manager:

pip install monalisten
# or
poetry add monalisten
# or
uv add monalisten

You can also install it from source:

pip install git+https://github.com/trag1c/monalisten.git

Usage

Foreword on how this works

GitHub webhooks can only send event data to publicly accessible HTTP endpoints. If your environment is behind a firewall, or a NAT, or you simply don't want to set up a server, you can use a relay service, like smee.io. It generates a unique relay URL to which GitHub sends requests to, and the relay then streams them to your local client via SSE. Monalisten connects to the relay's SSE URL and receives events as they arrive without any direct incoming connection to your machine.

[!warning] Relay URLs are essentially private endpoints. Anyone who knows your relay URL can send forged events. To mitigate this, configure a webhook secret in your GitHub repository or organization webhook settings. Pass the same secret to Monalisten through the token parameter. Now, Monalisten will validate incoming payloads and discard invalid ones.

Basic example

import asyncio

from monalisten import Monalisten
from monalisten.types import PushEvent

client = Monalisten("https://smee.io/aBCDef1gHijKLM2N", token="foobar")


@client.on("push")
async def log_push(event: PushEvent) -> None:
    actor = event.sender.login if event.sender else "Someone"
    print(f"{actor} pushed to the repo!")


asyncio.run(client.listen())

Monalisten heavily relies on the githubkit SDK for parsing and verifying payloads. The monalisten.types module (meant for type annotations) is actually a re-export of the githubkit.versions.v2022_11_28.webhooks module!

One event, multiple hooks

You can decorate several functions with the same event passed to Monalisten.on, and both of them will be registered:

@client.on("pull_request")
async def log_opened_pr(event: PullRequestEvent) -> None:
    if event.action != "opened":
        return
    print(f"New PR: #{event.number}")

@client.on("pull_request")
async def log_pr_action(event: PullRequestEvent) -> None:
    print(f"Something happened to PR #{event.number}!")

When an event type has several hooks attached, they're all run concurrently.

One hook, multiple events

You can decorate the same function with Monalisten.on several times:

@client.on("pull_request")
@client.on("push")
async def log_things(event: PullRequestEvent | PushEvent) -> None:
    if "PullRequest" in type(event).__name__:
        print("Something happened to a PR!")
    else:
        print("Someone pushed!")

Wildcard hooks

You can define a hook to be triggered for ALL events by setting the event name to *:

@client.on("*")
async def log(event: WebhookEvent) -> None:
    print(f"Something definitely happened... a {type(event).__name__} perhaps")

Internal events

Other than GitHub events, hooks can be created for handling a few internal events reported by Monalisten itself, such as:

• an HTTP client is created in .listen() (ready)
• an authentication issue arises (auth_issue)
• a processing error occurs (error)

Internal event hooks are defined with the Monalisten.on_internal decorator. The internal error event is the only one with default behavior—it will raise an exception and halt the client. The other two are simply ignored if no hook is defined.

ready

Triggered when an internal HTTP client is created and connected to the source, right before events are streamed. The expected hook signature is async () -> None.

@client.on_internal("ready")
async def on_ready() -> None:
    print("🚀 Monalisten is ready!")

auth_issue

During its authentication step, Monalisten can report issues for unexpected state. Reading those requires defining an auth issue hook. The expected hook signature is async (AuthIssue, dict[str, Any]) -> None.

import json
from pathlib import Path

from monalisten import AuthIssue

saved_events_dir = Path("/path/to/logs")

@client.on_internal("auth_issue")
async def log_and_save(issue: AuthIssue, event_data: dict[str, Any]) -> None:
    event_guid = event_data.get("x-github-delivery", "missing-guid")
    print(f"Auth issue in event {event_data}: token {issue.value}")
    (saved_events_dir / f"{event_guid}.json").write_text(json.dumps(event_data))

Monalisten will report auth issues in the following cases:

• the client sets a token, but:

  • the received event doesn't have a signature header
  • the received event's signature cannot be validated with the client's token

  (the event is not processed in both cases)

• the client doesn't set a token, but the received event has a signature header (the event is still processed)

error

Monalisten can raise an error in two contexts:

• during setup, when an invalid event name is used in a .on()/.on_internal() call
• during event processing, when an event payload is missing crucial fields, e.g. an event type header or a body

Only the errors occurring in the event processing context can have hooks set up. When an event is caused by an underlying Pydantic validation error, its errors will be passed to the hook as well. The expected hook signature is async (dict[str, Any], str, list[pydantic_core.ErrorDetails] | None) -> None.

from pydantic_core import ErrorDetails

@client.on_internal("error")
async def print_error_summary(
    event_data: dict[str, Any],
    message: str,
    pydantic_errors: list[ErrorDetails] | None,
) -> None:
    event_guid = event_data.get("x-github-delivery", "<missing-guid>")
    print(f"Error occurred in event {event_guid}: {message}")

    if not pydantic_errors:
        return

    print("Pydantic errors detected:")
    for err in pydantic_errors:
        print("-", err["msg"])
        print(" ", err["loc"])

API reference

AuthIssue

class AuthIssue(Enum):
    MISSING = "missing"
    UNEXPECTED = "unexpected"
    MISMATCH = "mismatch"

An enum representing authentication issues encountered by the Monalisten client, sent to auth_issue internal event hooks. The table below describes scenarios in which the issues occur.

Issue kind	Client token	Received signature	Verified
MISSING	✅	❌	—
UNEXPECTED	❌	✅	—
MISMATCH	✅	✅	❌

Monalisten

class Monalisten:
    def __init__(self, source: str, *, token: str | None = None) -> None: ...

Creates a Monalisten client streaming events from source, optionally secured by the secret token.

Monalisten.listen

class Monalisten:
    async def listen(self) -> None: ...

Instantiates an internal HTTP client and starts streaming events from source.

Monalisten.on

class Monalisten:
    def on(self, event: HookTrigger) -> HookWrapper[Hook[[H]]]: ...

Meant to be used as a decorator. Registers the decorated function as a hook for the event event. Raises an error if an invalid event name is provided. HookTrigger is either a GitHub event name or the wildcard hook "*".

In technical terms, this returns a function that registers the function passed in as a Monalisten hook.

Every hook is expected to have the signature of async (WebhookEvent) -> None (narrowed down to the specific event type).

Monalisten.on_internal

class Monalisten:
    def on_internal(self, event: MetaEventName) -> HookWrapper[Hook[...]]: ...

Meant to be used as a decorator. Registers the decorated function as a hook for the internal event event. Raises an error if an invalid event name is provided. MetaEventName is one of "ready", "auth_issue", or "error".

In technical terms, this returns a function that registers the function passed in as a Monalisten meta hook.

See the Internal events section for expected hook signatures for each event.

MonalistenError

class MonalistenError(Exception): ...

An exception for errors encountered by the Monalisten client (e.g. invalid event name or missing payload data).

GitHub event name reference

For a list of event names that can be passed to Monalisten.on, see GitHub's documentation page on Webhook events and payloads.

monalisten.types reference

For a list of type names that can be used as event annotations, see the src/monalisten/types.py file, or, if you use one, rely on your LSP's autocomplete!

License

monalisten is licensed under the MIT License. © trag1c, 2025