With Sendbird Chat, you can easily design, build, and customize the perfect chat messaging solution for your app. It’s secure, reliable, and highly scalable—the Sendbird Platform API adds flexibility and functionalities on the server-side. It is very accessible, and there’s comprehensive documentation. To build responsive real-time features using other API services in your application, you first need to enable webhooks. In this article, you’ll find everything you need to know about webhooks, including how to build custom responses to chat events using Sendbird.
A webhook creates an HTTP callback to one server with data about an event in another web service. Compared to polling, webhooks are far more efficient and enable you to build features that use real-time data. It is the best way for developers to programmatically create a web service action in response to an event on another web service.
Often, developers will use webhooks to create a customized notification system for events in a Sendbird-enabled app.
Here’s an example. You’d like to send a notification to members of a channel when someone sends a message within it. A webhook will let your servers know when a message is sent to the channel by sending an HTTP POST with specific data about the message and channel. If the user who receives the message is logged into your app, you can now trigger a push notification to alert them of the message. If the recipient isn’t logged into the app and cannot receive a push, you can use webhooks to trigger an SMS to a phone number, email address, or both.
This is a common and essential example because many apps across different industries need to notify users of new messages. Use cases include:
Other uses for webhooks include triggering a payments API, triggering a social media or email API, and more.
Used in Sendbird, webhooks send an HTTP POST request with a JSON payload to your server when an event occurs on the Sendbird servers, such as:
Please read the complete list of events supported by the Sendbird webhooks in our Platform API documentation.
You can control the number and type of HTTP requests you receive, by enabling webhooks for specific events.
To enable webhooks, make the following HTTP request
PUT https://api-{application_id}.sendbird.com/v3/applications/settings/webhook
The request body only supports the property, enabled_events[], described below.
The following example of a Request body shows a user turning on webhooks for ‘creating’ and ‘joining’ a channel (group_channel:create and group_channel:join), and ‘inviting’ a user to a channel (group_channel:invite).
If successful, this request returns information about the webhook configuration in the response body as follows.
To retrieve a list of your currently enabled webhooks, use the following request:
GET https://api-{application_id}.sendbird.com/v3/applications/settings/webhook
Verifying that an unaltered webhook request comes from Sendbird is crucial to maintaining security. For that reason, Sendbird produces a signature in SHA-256 and applies it to both the POST request body and your access token.
Each HTTP POST request from Sendbird will include the following header:
The x-signature is a critical feature ensuring that the HTTP POST request you receive is
The x-signature applies SHA-256 to the POST request body and your API token. To verify the request, apply SHA-256 to the request body and your API token. Next, confirm that the resulting value is equal to the x-signature.
Occasionally, a server does not receive a request. If a webhook request fails, you can expect the following behavior from Sendbird’s webhooks.
To avoid too many requests, you should implement your endpoint to respond immediately to the server with a 200 OK response.
To support heavy traffic to your servers (including webhook requests), we recommend setting up your architecture like in this diagram. We leverage the AWS tech stack (e.g., the API Gateway) to create a highly scalable architecture.
When specific events occur in your Sendbird application, Sendbird sends HTTP POST requests with JSON payloads to your webhook endpoint. Your webhook endpoint must meet the following requirements:
In the case where you already have an infrastructure in place, and you will build a webhook receiving service within your existing infrastructure, consider how your current infrastructure’s security and setup settings may impact your ability to receive webhooks from Sendbird.
For example:
Note, if a 400 error is returned, Sendbird will try to resend the notification automatically.
The following is an example of a webhook notification sent to your server. When a user sends a message, the Sendbird webhooks will send this notification. You can use the JSON payload to implement behaviors in other servers whenever a message is sent to the Sendbird client.
Thanks to the flexibility and power of webhooks, developers can implement new custom features within their apps and link the Sendbird Platform API to many other API services.
Ultimately, webhooks make it possible to link all the API services your business uses to create some incredible experiences. We hope you’ll continue to explore how you can use webhooks to introduce features that your users will love. Remember, the Sendbird team is always here to help.
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