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Webhooks, explained

Short, practical guides for developers who receive webhooks: what they are, how to secure them, and how to keep them working when things go wrong. No sign-up needed.

  1. 01

    What is a webhook? Webhooks vs. polling vs. WebSockets

    How webhooks work, when to use them instead of polling or WebSockets, and what a webhook request looks like on the wire.

    6 min read
  2. 02

    Webhook security: HMAC signatures, timestamps and replay protection

    Why every webhook endpoint must verify signatures, how HMAC verification works step by step, and the mistakes that quietly break it.

    8 min read
  3. 03

    Webhook retries, idempotency and failure handling

    How to design webhook handlers that survive downtime, duplicates and out-of-order events: retries with backoff, idempotency keys and dead letters.

    8 min read
  4. 04

    How to test webhooks locally

    Get real webhooks to the app on your laptop: tunnels, provider CLIs, replaying captured events, and what to check before you ship.

    6 min read
  5. 05

    Fixing Stripe webhook signature verification errors

    “No signatures found matching the expected signature for payload”: the five causes, how to spot each one, and how to fix them in Node, Express and Next.js.

    7 min read

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