How the best in class offer webhooks (examples)
Tags: Twilio, Webhooks, Slack, Stripe, Github

Today we are going to take a look at the webhook offerings of a few top companies: Stripe, Slack, Twilio, and Github.

Stripe

Stripe’s webhook Dashboard

Stripe offers webhooks to notify developers when important events happen on the platform, such as when an asynchronous payment methods processes or when a new invoice is generated. Stripe’s webhook offering is quite comprehensive and they actually send events every time an important object is created or updated, so you can actually use their webhooks to sync Stripe’s data to your own database.

What’s cool about Stripe’s offering that we have not seen many other companies offer is that they include a CLI where you can test out webhook events to your local machine! No surprise given the company is known for being very developer experience friendly.

Slack

Slack’s most popular use case for webhooks is for the opposite use case which is incoming webhooks. If you want to create an application that posts messages to Slack when interesting events happen in your system, you can create a Slack webhook endpoint with a unique URL your system can make a POST request to. When you call that URL, you will see your message show up on the designated Slack channel!

POST https://hooks.slack.com/services/T00000000/B00000000/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX Content-type: application/json { "text": "Hello, world." }

A Slackbot notification

Twilio

Twilio’s webhooks send information to your servers about events that have just occurred. For example, you may elect to get a webhook event every time a text message is sent to a Twilio phone number.

Twilio webhooks diagram

Twilio’s webhooks fall into two categories: one of which is simply informative and tells your application what has happened in the Twilio ecosystem, and another which requires your servers to take some sort of action in response.

An example that falls into the first category is Twilio might send you a webhook event when a voice mail is ready for download.

An example that falls into the second category, as depicted in the diagram above, is when your webhook server can respond to a Twilio event letting Twilio know programmatically how to respond when one of your phone numbers is called.

Github

Github’s webhooks allow you to build integrations that respond to various Github events such as when a pull request is reviewed or when a build is finished running. You can use these notifications for example, to update external issue tracking services you may use such as JIRA, or even block or kick off a code deployment.

Github webhook set up

Github does a good job of showing you a log of all your webhook deliveries and well as details into which ones failed, which is crucial in helping developers debug their integrations.

Github webhook delivery log

This was a brief tour of how a few of the most popular B2B applications on the internet utilize webhooks to give their developers a richer experience and create a more integrated and sticky platform. By supporting webhooks, these companies have no doubt enriched the ecosystem around their products, catapulting them into the behemoths they are today.

Looking to enrich your own developer platform by offering webhooks? Integrate with Gowebhook today to get a fully-featured webhook delivery platform based on best in class practices that can scale with you as you grow.