title: Emulate github service hooks wih curl
body: <p>I have a service listening to github service hooks, to perform automatic deployment. Sometimes I need to trigger this manually (without github intervention). For that, I am emulating the POST request that github is sending (post-receive-URLs).</p>
  
  <p>My data (<code>my.json</code>) looks like this (a limited subset of what github is sending - I do not need more):</p>
  
  <pre><code>{
    "action"      : "deploy_from_scratch_with_bundle",
    "pusher"      : { "email" : "my@email.com" },
    "ref"         : "refs/heads/master"
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>And I try to POST with curl:</p>
  
  <pre><code>curl -X POST $URL --data-urlencode "@my.json" --header "Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The problem is that github is POSTing like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>payload=%7B%22pusher%22%3A%7B%22name%22%3A%22none%22%7D%2C%22repository%22%3
  A%7B%22name%22%3A%liferay-plugins%22%2C%22created_at%22%3A%222011%2F12%2F07%2011%3A52...
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>See that <code>payload=</code> there? This looks like a form field. I do not know how to combine form fields with urlencoding. To POST form fields, I would do it like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>curl -X POST $URL -F "payload=@my.json"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But the JSON would not be url encoded. How to I get both?</p>