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Guides & deep dives
Practical guides on webhooks, reliability, and debugging, for developers who need them to just work.
Monitoring Webhook Health: The Metrics That Actually Matter
Uptime doesn't tell you whether webhooks are working. A short list of the signals that actually indicate a healthy webhook pipeline, and what each one catches that the others miss.
Alerting on Webhook Failures Without Alert Fatigue
Notify on every failed delivery attempt and you'll train people to ignore the channel. A pattern for alerting on what actually needs a human, and staying quiet about what doesn't.
IP Allowlisting vs Signature Verification: What Actually Secures a Webhook Endpoint
IP allowlisting feels like a solid first line of defence for a webhook endpoint. It isn't, and understanding why makes the case for signature verification much clearer.
Fan-Out: Delivering One Webhook to Multiple Destinations
A single Stripe or GitHub webhook often needs to reach more than one service: billing, notifications, analytics. How to fan out delivery without coupling those services to the provider or to each other.
Webhook Payload Versioning: Handling Provider Schema Changes
Providers change their webhook payloads without always telling you. How to write consumer code that survives a field being renamed, removed, or quietly added.
Redacting Sensitive Data in Webhook Payloads
Webhook bodies end up in logs, dashboards, and error trackers more often than anyone intends. A practical approach to stripping out what shouldn't be there without breaking replay or debugging.
Building an Idempotent Webhook Handler
Knowing you need idempotency and actually implementing it correctly are different problems. A working pattern using a database constraint, with the race conditions and edge cases that break naive versions.
Webhook Rate Limiting: Protecting Your Endpoint from Bursts
A provider outage recovering, a Black Friday sales spike, or a bulk import can all send years of normal traffic in minutes. How to keep a burst of webhooks from taking your endpoint down.
Debugging Webhooks in Production: A Practical Approach
When a webhook integration breaks in production, guesswork wastes hours. A systematic method for narrowing down where the failure actually happened.
Shopify Webhooks: Setup, Verification, and Common Pitfalls
How to receive, verify, and reliably process Shopify webhook events. Covers topic subscriptions, HMAC verification, compliance webhooks, and the mistakes that break integrations.
Why Your Webhook Handler Should Respond in Under 5 Seconds
Webhook providers time out fast, and a slow handler looks identical to a broken one from their side. What causes slow responses and how to fix them.
Local Webhook Testing: How to Receive Webhooks on Localhost
Webhooks can't reach localhost directly. How tunnelling tools work, how to pick one, and how to build a local testing workflow that doesn't slow you down.
Why Webhook Watchtower
Every team receiving webhooks ends up building the same thing: an ingest endpoint, a log, retries, signature checks. Here's the case for not building it yourself.
Webhook Payloads Contain More Sensitive Data Than You Think
The headers and bodies of incoming webhooks often include credentials, customer data, and signature secrets. What to be careful about, and how to keep it under control.
What is Webhook Watchtower?
I built the tool I always wished existed when debugging webhook failures. What it does, why I built it, and what's included.
Stop Processing the Same Webhook Twice
Duplicate webhook deliveries are more common than most teams expect. Why providers send them, how they cause problems, and how to detect them reliably.
Exponential Backoff: The Right Way to Retry Failed Webhooks
When webhook delivery fails, naive retry logic makes things worse. What exponential backoff is, why it matters, and how to implement it correctly.
GitHub Webhooks: A Complete Setup and Debugging Guide
How to receive, verify, and reliably process GitHub webhook events. Covers repository events, Actions, signature verification, and common failure patterns.
Stripe Webhooks: A Practical Guide to Getting Them Right
Everything you need to know about receiving, verifying, and reliably handling Stripe webhook events. From setup through to production best practices.
Webhook Signature Verification: What It Is and Why You Need It
Without signature verification, anyone who knows your webhook URL can send fake events. How HMAC-based verification works and how to implement it correctly.
Why Webhooks Fail (And How to Fix Them)
Webhooks fail silently more often than you'd think. A breakdown of the most common failure modes, why they're hard to spot, and how to deal with each one.
Webhooks vs Polling: Which Should You Use?
Polling is simple and predictable. Webhooks are efficient but harder to operate. How to choose between them, and what to do when webhooks are the right call but hard to get right.
What Is a Webhook? How They Work and Why They Matter
A webhook is an HTTP POST request a service sends to your server when something happens. How they work, what you need to receive them, and the failure modes to plan for.