Webhooks Overview

By using webhooks, you can tightly integrate your server application with Stream Chat. The platform supports three kinds of webhooks: Push, Before-Message-Send, and Custom Commands. All of them follow the common set of rules:

• Webhook should be reachable from the public internet. Tunneling services like Ngrok are supported

• Webhook should accept HTTP POST requests with JSON payload

• Webhook should respond with response codes from 200 to 299

• Webhook should respond as fast as possible. The exact time given for the response varies between webhook types

• Webhook should be ready to accept the same call multiple times: in case of network or remote server failure Stream Chat could retry the request (behavior varies between webhook types)

All webhook requests contain these headers:

Security and Performance

We highly recommend following common security guidelines to make your webhook integration safe and fast:

• Use HTTPS with a certificate from a trusted authority (eg.Let’s Encrypt)

• Verify the ” X-Signature ” header

• Support HTTP Keep-Alive

• Be highly available

• Offload the processing of the message if possible (read, store, and forget)

Webhook types

Stream Chat supports several webhook types:

Signature

All HTTP requests can be verified as coming from Stream (and not tampered by a 3rd party) by analyzing the signature attached to the request. Every request includes an HTTP header called “X-Signature” containing a cryptographic signature of the message. Your webhook endpoint can validate that payload and signature match:

// first argument is the request body as a string, second the signature header
const valid = client.verifyWebhook(req.rawBody, req.headers["x-signature"]);

import stream_chat

client = StreamChat(api_key="STREAM_KEY", api_secret="STREAM_SECRET")

# Django request
valid = client.verify_webhook(request.body, request.META['HTTP_X_SIGNATURE'])

# Flask request
valid = client.verify_webhook(request.data, request.headers['X-SIGNATURE'])

require 'stream-chat'

client = StreamChat::Client.new(api_key='STREAM_KEY', api_secret='STREAM_SECRET')

# signature comes from the HTTP header x-signature
valid = client.verify_webhook(request_body, signature)

$client = new GetStream\StreamChat\Client("STREAM_API_KEY", "STREAM_API_SECRET");

// signature comes from the HTTP header x-signature
$valid = $client->verifyWebhook($requestBody, $signature);

client, _ := stream.NewClient(APIKey, []byte(APISecret))

// signature comes from the HTTP header x-signature
isValid := client.VerifyWebhook(body, signature)

// signature comes from the HTTP header x-signature
appClient.VerifyWebhook(requestBody, signature);

// signature comes from the HTTP header x-signature
var valid = App.verifyWebhook(body, signature);

Configuration

You can configure your webhook endpoints in the Stream Chat Dashboard or by using server-side SDK client:

// update webhook URLs
await client.updateAppSettings({
  webhook_url: "https://example.com/webhooks/stream/push", // sets Push webhook address
  before_message_send_hook_url:
    "https://example.com/webhooks/stream/before-message-send", // sets Before Message Send webhook address
  custom_action_handler_url:
    "https://example.com/webhooks/stream/custom-commands?type={type}", // sets Custom Commands webhook address
});

client.update_app_settings(
 webhook_url="https://example.com/webhooks/stream/push", # sets Push webhook address
 before_message_send_hook_url="https://example.com/webhooks/stream/before-message-send", # sets Before Message Send webhook address
 custom_action_handler_url="https://example.com/webhooks/stream/custom-commands?type={type}", # sets Custom Commands webhook address
)

client.update_app_settings(
 webhook_url: "https://example.com/webhooks/stream/push", # sets Push webhook address
 before_message_send_hook_url: "https://example.com/webhooks/stream/before-message-send", # sets Before Message Send webhook address
 custom_action_handler_url: "https://example.com/webhooks/stream/custom-commands?type={type}", # sets Custom Commands webhook address
)

$settings = [
 "webhook_url" => "https://example.com/webhooks/stream/push", // sets Push webhook address
 "before_message_send_hook_url" => "https://example.com/webhooks/stream/before-message-send", // sets Before Message Send webhook address
 "custom_action_handler_url" => "https://example.com/webhooks/stream/custom-commands?type={type}" // sets Custom Commands webhook address
];
$client->updateAppSettings($settings);

App
 .update()
 .webhookURL("https://example.com/webhooks/stream/push") // sets Push webhook address
 .beforeMessageSendHookUrl("https://example.com/webhooks/stream/before-message-send") // sets Before Message Send webhook address
 .customActionHandlerUrl("https://example.com/webhooks/stream/custom-commands?type={type}") // sets Custom Commands webhook address
 .request();

await appClient.UpdateAppSettingsAsync(new AppSettingsRequest
{
  WebhookURL = "https://example.com/webhooks/stream/push", // sets Push webhook address
  BeforeMessageSendHookUrl = "https://example.com/webhooks/stream/before-message-send", // sets Before Message Send webhook address
  CustomActionHandlerUrl = "https://example.com/webhooks/stream/custom-commands?type={type}", // sets Custom Commands webhook address
});

settings := &AppSettings{
	WebhookURL:        "https://example.com/webhooks/stream/push", // sets Push webhook address
	BeforeMessageSendHookURL: "https://example.com/webhooks/stream/before-message-send", // sets Before Message Send webhook address
	CustomActionHandlerURL:  "https://example.com/webhooks/stream/custom-commands?type={type}", // sets Custom Commands webhook address
}

client.UpdateAppSettings(ctx, settings)

Also, webhooks could be configured using our CLI client:

stream chat:webhook:push --url 'https://example.com/webhooks/stream/push'
stream chat:webhook:before-message-send --url 'https://example.com/webhooks/stream/before-message-send'
stream chat:webhook:custom-commands --url 'https://example.com/webhooks/stream/custom-commands?type={type}'

Migration to Multi-Event Hooks

Stream is gradually rolling out a new multi-event hooks system that provides more flexibility in handling various events. If you receive an error message like:

Cannot set webhook URL, webhook events, SQS URL, SQS key, SQS secret, SNS topic ARN, SNS key, SNS secret, or async moderation config in new hook v2 system. Use the event_hooks field to configure webhooks.

This means your app has been migrated to the new system. In this case, you should:

1. Stop using the webhook configuration methods shown above
2. Switch to using the new multi-event hooks configuration described in the Multi-Event Hooks documentation
3. Update your application code to use the new event_hooks field for configuring webhooks

The new system offers several advantages:

• Configure multiple webhook endpoints for different event types
• Support for URL templating
• More flexible event routing options
• Support for various hook types (webhook, SQS, SNS, pending message)

Request info

Some webhooks contain a field request_info, which holds information about the client that issued the request. This info is intended as an additional signal that you can use for moderation, fraud detection, or other similar purposes.

When configuring the SDK, you may also set an additional x-stream-ext header to be sent with each request. The value of this header is passed along as an ext field in the request_info. You can use this to pass along information that may be useful, such as device information. Refer to the SDK-specific docs on how to set this header.

"request_info": {
 "type": "client",
 "ip": "86.84.2.2",
 "user_agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/117.0",
 "sdk": "stream-chat-react-10.11.0-stream-chat-javascript-client-browser-8.12.1",
 "ext": "device-id=123"
}

For example, in Javascript, you can set the value like this:

client = new StreamChat(apiKey, {
  axiosRequestConfig: {
    headers: {
      "x-stream-ext": "device-id=123",
    },
  },
});

The format of the ext header is up to you and you may leave it blank if you don’t need it. The value is passed as-is, so you can use a simple value, comma-separated key-values, or more structured data, such as JSON. Binary data must be encoded as a string, for example using base64 or hex encoding.

Restricting access to webhook

If necessary, you can only expose your webhook service to Stream. This is possible by configuring your network (eg. iptables rules) to drop all incoming traffic that is not coming from our API infrastructure.

Below you can find the complete list of egress IP addresses that our webhook infrastructure uses. Such list is static and is not changing over time.