Updates, tutorials, and tips from the Webhook Stream team.
Webhooks have an inherent trust problem. When your server receives an HTTP POST claiming to be from Stripe, GitHub, or any other service, how do you know it's legitimate? The endpoint URL isn't secret — anyone who discovers it (through logs, source code, or brute force) can send fake events.
A webhook isn't arriving. Maybe it never was. Maybe it stopped working after a deploy. Maybe it works for some events but not others. You're staring at your logs and the webhook provider's dashboard, and neither is telling you enough.
Every time one system needs data from another, you face the same fundamental question: who initiates the communication? The answer determines which pattern you use — and choosing wrong means you'll either waste resources, add latency, or build unnecessary complexity.
You can build the most robust webhook delivery system in the world — exponential backoff, cryptographic signatures, idempotency — and still have no idea it's failing until a customer files a support ticket asking why they haven't received events in three days.
A webhook that fires once and gives up isn't a webhook you can rely on. Networks are unreliable, servers go down for deployments, and rate limits kick in at the worst possible moment. If your webhook system doesn't have a solid retry strategy, you're going to lose events — and your users are going to lose trust.
Webhooks are simple in concept — an HTTP POST fires when something happens — but making them reliable in production is a different story. This guide covers everything you need: retry logic with exponential backoff, cryptographic signature verification, idempotency, timeout handling, and monitoring, with full code examples in Node.js and Python.