webhook-relay

Status: Highly experimental, not actively maintained

A Node.js server for forwarding webhook requests in a non-blocking manner.

http://www.webhooks.org/ are brilliant, but implementing them as a provider is a little tricky as your application has to make HTTP request to arbitrary endpoints when specific actions occur. If there are many of those endpoints and some of them are slow to respond, this could degrade the performance of your application.

A common solution to this problem is to place outgoing webhook requests in a queue. webhook-relay is a self-contained queue and response sending agent. You send it an HTTP POST describing the webhook request that needs to be sent, it replies instantly with an "OK", and the request itself is sent off shortly afterwards.

webhook-relay should respond within a few ms, so your main application can safely block on the call to webhook-relay.

webhook-relay also tracks statistics on the number of calls it has made successfully.

Installation:

git clone git://github.com/simonw/webhook-relay.git
cd webhook-relay
# Pull in dependencies: djangode and restler
git submodule init
git submodule update

# Run the server:
node webhook-restler.js

Usage from Python:

import urllib, json

urllib.urlopen(
    'http://localhost:8056/relay/', urllib.urlencode({
        'url': 'http://www.postbin.org/13lam6a',
        'data': json.dumps({'foo': 'bar', 'baz': 'bwaf'})
    })
).read()

Then visit http://www.postbin.org/13lam6a to see what was posted. You can also visit http://localhost:8056/ to see basic webhook-relay statistics.