# 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 endpoint which adds a high priority job to the repo fetch queue. 

The webhook endpoint is authenticated using access tokens which you can create at `https://sourcegraph.example.com/site-admin/tokens`

Here's an example using curl:

```bash
curl -XPOST \
    -H 'Authorization: token $SRC_ACCESS_TOKEN' \
    https://sourcegraph.example.com/.api/repos/$REPO_NAME/-/refresh
```

## Disabling built-in repo updating

Sourcegraph will periodically ask your code host to list its repositories via its HTTP API to _discover repositories_. You can control how often this occurs by changing [`repoListUpdateInterval`](/admin/config/site-config) 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 needed by setting [`disableAutoGitUpdates`](/admin/config/site-config) to `true`, then the repository will only be updated when the webhook is used or when a user visits the repository directly.

## Code host webhooks

We support receiving webhooks directly from your code host for [GitHub](/admin/webhooks/incoming#github), [GitLab](/admin/webhooks/incoming#gitlab), [Bitbucket Server](/admin/webhooks/incoming#bitbucket-server) and [Bitbucket Cloud](/admin/webhooks/incoming#bitbucket-cloud).