Overview
You can configure your Stream app to receive webhook events as well as AWS SNS and AWS SQS. Webhooks are usually the simplest way to receive events from your app and to perform additional action based on what happens to your application.
The configuration can be done using the API or from the Dashboard. By default, all events are sent to your webhook/sqs/sns endpoint, you can also configure the events you want to receive in the dashboard.
Some important points to consider:
- The selection of events you want to receive applies to all the endpoints you have configured.
- You can configure multiple endpoints for the same app (eg. AWS SNS and HTTP Webhook).
- If your app is configured to receive all events, you can still filter the events you want to receive in your webhook handler.
- If your app is configured to receive all events, newly introduced event types will be sent to your webhook handler by default.
- If you pick specific events, newly introduced event types will not be sent to your webhook handler by default (you can still manually add them later on).
How to implement a webhook handler
Your webhook handler needs to follow these rules:
- accept HTTP POST requests with JSON payload
- be reachable from the public internet. Tunneling services like Ngrok are supported
- respond with response codes from 200 to 299 as fast as possible
Your webhook handler can use the type field to handle events based correctly based on their type and payload.
All webhook requests contain these headers:
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| X-WEBHOOK-ID | Unique ID of the webhook call. This value is consistent between retries and could be used to deduplicate retry calls |
| X-WEBHOOK-ATTEMPT | Number of webhook request attempt starting from 1 |
| X-API-KEY | Your application’s API key. Should be used to validate request signature |
| X-SIGNATURE | HMAC signature of the request body. See Signature section |
Best Practices
We highly recommend following common security guidelines to make your webhook integration safe and fast:
- Use HTTPS with a certificate from a trusted authority
- Verify the "X-Signature" header to ensure the request is coming from Stream
- Support HTTP Keep-Alive
- Use a highly available infrastructure such as AWS Elastic Load Balancer, Google Cloud Load Balancer, or similar
- Offload the processing of the message if possible (read, store, and forget)
- When decoding JSON into objects, ensure that your webhook can handle new fields being added to the JSON payload as well as new event types (eg. log unknown fields and event types instead of failing)
Error Handling
In case of the request failure Stream Chat attempts to retry a request. The amount of maximum attempts depends on the kind of the error it receives:
- Response code is 408, 429 or >=500: 3 attempts
- Network error: 2 attempts
- Request timeout: 3 attempts
The timeout of one request is 6 seconds, and the request with all retries cannot exceed the duration of 15 seconds.