Overview
You can configure your Stream app to send events to your HTTP/webhook and/or to your AWS SQS queue. Webhooks are usually the simplest way to receive events from your app and to perform additional action based on what happens to your application.
Both SQS and Webhook can be configured from the Stream Dashboard.
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 |
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
- Verify the "X-Signature" header
- Support HTTP Keep-Alive
- Be highly available
- Offload the processing of the message if possible (read, store, and forget)
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.