Github webhooks is a feature that allows you to send HTTP POST payload to certain events that occurs in your repository hosted on github. Events like pushing to a branch or merge are good examples for using webhooks.

Read more about webhooks

Webhooks can be used for triggering builds or deployments and allows us to integrate devOps principles even if you don’t use any Platform as a Service(PaaS).

Here is a really good blog post of setting up webhook for continuous deployment in your VPS.

Setting up Github Webhook

I use webhooks to trigger a hugo build on my server and move the contents of the static site generated to my nginx root folder.