What are Standard Webhooks and what can they do for you?

Webhooks are a great complement to typical REST APIs, but using them requires you to make a number of design decisions. Until recently, you either used a platform or designed them yourself, but now there is a Webhooks standard to help:

👉 Standard Webhooks - www.standardwebhooks.com/

👉 Standard Webhooks specification on @GitHub - github.com/standard-webhooks/standard-webhooks/blo…

As Chris Wood points out, this is more "friendly advice" than a formal standard, but it's a great to (a) validate the design decisions you have made for your webhooks, or (b) avoid design deliberations and simply go with the recommendations made by the standard.

Platforms such as Svix or Webhookie will typically make those design decisions for you, and with Tom Hacohen of Svix being a co-author of the standard it should be no surprise that Svix follows all of the recommendations of the standard. In the future we may see webhooks practices converging towards the recommendations made in the Standard Webhooks document.

For those of you interested in some housekeeping: Since this specification does introduce three new HTTP header fields (webhook-id, webhook-signature, webhook-timestamp) I have added these to the Web Concepts list of HTTP header fields at webconcepts.info/concepts/http-header/. This list is now showing 226 HTTP header fields.

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