Building Webhooks Into Your Application: Guidelines and Best Practices

This post discusses guidelines and best practices for building webhooks into an application. Webhooks are reverse APIs that actively send out data to other systems based on internal triggers, requiring persistence of information on where the data is sent and its status. The process involves creating a service that makes POST requests to arbitrary endpoints, using a database to store endpoints and associated metadata, and providing a form for developers to subscribe. Handling authentication with webhooks requires verifying the developer's ownership of the endpoint and managing security by signing and encrypting payloads. Error handling, ordering, and duplicates should be considered when sending events. Finally, development tips such as testing with live URLs, sample events library, logging, separating events from webhooks, and using streaming event-based databases are suggested for a smoother implementation process.