Hasty Treat - Webhooks
In this Hasty Treat, Scott and Wes talk about webhooks — one of those concepts that seems a lot scarier than it actually is.
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Show Notes
03:42 - What are webhooks?
- User-defined HTTP callbacks
- When something happens, ping this URL with this data
- Examples:
- When something sells, ping this URL
- When someone reverses a charge, lock their account
- Trigger a build of the website when the content changes
- Then someone buys a shirt, generate a shipping label and save it to the DB
07:57 - Sending End
- Can be a great way to hook two services together
09:13 - Receiving End
- Often you will be the one that accepts the webhook ping
- In this case, you set up an endpoint
11:00 - Payloads
- Almost all will send a JSON body that you parse out
- The method send is variable
11:51 - Auth
- On the receiving end of a webhook, you often get a token which you can then ping the service with. It will tell you if that request was legit or not.
- On the sending end, you can often set up headers with auth - same with the method
- Can be a replacement for a serverless function
13:18 - Testing webhooks
- Can be a pain in the ass
- ngrok - expose locally
- localtunnel
- Insomnia
- Postman
- Stripe has a great VS code extension
- Snipcart has an awesome dashboard
- Will also tell you when one failed
- webhook.site
- https://expose.dev/
- IFTTT
- Zapier
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