6. Push Notifications and Spring Cloud Bus

Many source code repository providers (such as Github, Gitlab, Gitea, Gitee, Gogs, or Bitbucket) notify you of changes in a repository through a webhook. You can configure the webhook through the provider’s user interface as a URL and a set of events in which you are interested. For instance, Github uses a POST to the webhook with a JSON body containing a list of commits and a header (X-Github-Event) set to push. If you add a dependency on the spring-cloud-config-monitor library and activate the Spring Cloud Bus in your Config Server, then a /monitor endpoint is enabled.

When the webhook is activated, the Config Server sends a RefreshRemoteApplicationEvent targeted at the applications it thinks might have changed. The change detection can be strategized. However, by default, it looks for changes in files that match the application name (for example, foo.properties is targeted at the foo application, while application.properties is targeted at all applications). The strategy to use when you want to override the behavior is PropertyPathNotificationExtractor, which accepts the request headers and body as parameters and returns a list of file paths that changed.

The default configuration works out of the box with Github, Gitlab, Gitea, Gitee, Gogs or Bitbucket. In addition to the JSON notifications from Github, Gitlab, Gitee, or Bitbucket, you can trigger a change notification by POSTing to /monitor with form-encoded body parameters in the pattern of path={name}. Doing so broadcasts to applications matching the {name} pattern (which can contain wildcards).

	Note
	The RefreshRemoteApplicationEvent is transmitted only if the spring-cloud-bus is activated in both the Config Server and in the client application.

	Note
	The default configuration also detects filesystem changes in local git repositories. In that case, the webhook is not used. However, as soon as you edit a config file, a refresh is broadcast.