Triggers
When events occur in apps — a new Slack message, a GitHub commit, an incoming email — triggers send event data to your application as structured payloads.
Two trigger types
| Type | What happens | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Webhook | The provider pushes events to a Composio-issued ingress URL in real time. Composio verifies the provider's signature, processes the payload, and fans the event out to matching trigger instances. | Slack, Asana, Notion, Outlook |
| Polling | Composio polls the provider on a schedule. Composio managed auth has a 15-minute minimum interval; expect that as the worst-case delay between source event and delivery. | Gmail, Google Calendar |
Composio handles ingress setup on most webhook triggers. For some webhook triggers — typically when you bring your own OAuth app — providers only deliver webhooks to URLs you've registered on the OAuth app, so you'll need to register the Composio-issued ingress URL there once for events to start flowing into Composio. See Configuring the webhook endpoint.
Working with triggers
- Subscribe to events so Composio knows which URL to deliver to. One-time per project.
- Discover available trigger types for a toolkit (e.g.,
GITHUB_COMMIT_EVENT). - Create an active trigger scoped to a user's connected account — see Creating triggers, which also covers Configuring the webhook endpoint for triggers that need it.
- Receive events at your subscription URL and route on
metadata.trigger_slug. - Manage triggers — enable, disable, or delete as needed.
Triggers are scoped to a connected account. If you haven't set up authentication yet, see Authentication.
Next steps
Subscribing to events
One-time per project: tell Composio which URL to deliver events to
Creating triggers
Inspect a trigger type and create trigger instances via the SDK or dashboard
Verifying webhooks
Verify webhook signatures and understand payload versions
Managing triggers
Discover, list, enable, disable, and delete triggers
Example: Gmail labeler
Build an automated email labeling agent using triggers