simonw / webhook-relay

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.