A webhook forwarding client based on Python

Simple webhook forwarder script to send webhooks from a hosted url to your local machine that has a tunneling service such as Ngrok set up.

Example usecase

Many services such as Whatsapp Business Cloud only send out updates via webhook. To receive these updates, you have to register a webhook url beforehand. During development, you would typically use a service like Ngrok to tunnel the webhook requests to your local machine. The issue with this is that for the free version of Ngrok, a new url is generated everytime you restart the service, and then you would have to manually. A good solution is to host this forwarding client on a virtual server (e.g Heroku) and using its url as your webhook address, then sending a simple post request to the endpoint 'https://herokuapp.your-app-name.com/setwebhook' with the new ngrok url (I have a script to get this url too)

How to use

To use for Whatsapp Business Cloud Api (which is what prompted my to write this script):

1. Deploy this app to heroku as is by clicking the deploy button below. If you do not want to deploy to heroku, then the process might be different. For extra customization such as using a subpath, navigate to src/config.py and edit the SUBPATH variable to the subpath you want to receive your webhooks in.

2. Use the app's url as your webhook url. e.g https://herokuapp.your-app-name.com

3. Clone this repo to your project directory.

For Python

4. pip install requests
5. To update the heroku app with your ngrok url, you need to import the update_webhook function from the cloned directory. e.g from .webhook-forwarder.client import update_webhook
6. Call the update_webhook function passing in the url of the deployed heroku app only. Ensure that ngrok is already running at this point.

For Node

4. npm install axios
5. To update the heroku app with your ngrok url, you need to import the update_webhook function from the cloned directory. e.g import update_webhook from ./webhook-forwarder/client or const update_webhook = require("./webhook-forwarder/client")
6. Call the update_webhook function passing in the url of the deployed heroku app only. Ensure that ngrok is already running at this point.