Working with webhooks locally

Developing against a service like SuperAPI, which expects to send webhooks to a URL that is reachable on the internet, can be tricky. One way of solving this problem is to use a tunneling service like Ngrok to expose a local service on your machine to the internet.

::: Info If you're not sure what your webhook_url is set to, you can retrieve your product settings using your product API key. :::

To configure Ngrok alongside our local services, we use the following entry in our docker-compose.yml

yaml

ngrok:
  image: ngrok/ngrok:latest
  command:
    - "start"
    - "--all"
    - "--config"
    - "/etc/ngrok.yml"
    - "--authtoken"
    - ${NGROK_AUTH_TOKEN}
  volumes:
    - ./ngrok.yml:/etc/ngrok.yml
  ports:
    - 4040:4040

The contents of our ngrok.yml look like:

yaml

version: 2

tunnels:
  superapi:
    proto: http
    addr: backend2:4000 # this points to your local service
    domain: REDACTED.ngrok.dev # your custom Ngrok domain name

You will need to have an NGROK_AUTH_TOKEN environment variable set in the shell which is executing the docker-compose.yml

INFO

Ngrok isn't the only tool available that does this, have a look at https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling for a full list of services in this space.

Working with webhooks locally ​

Working with webhooks locally