Webhooks are messages ( or payload ) sent from an application after the execution of an operation. They are also used to communicate between a chain of services; for example, a payment provider emits webhook events to an e-commerce application’s endpoint after a payment operation. Convoy can be used to send webhook events from your application to your clients by serving as a reliable egress.
To demonstrate how Convoy solves this problem, we will build a Todo API in Laravel and use Convoy to publish webhook events for each operation on our Todo items; create, update & delete.
Prerequisites
To follow along you would need the following
- A Convoy Cloud account.
- An Outgoing Project ID & API Key.
For the sake of brevity, we created an additional resource to help with creating user endpoints, usually users will supply this information to you via your dashboard. [2] We have also left out other aspects of the code not necessary for this guide.
API Spec
Our API looks like this:
- Endpoint
GET /endpoints GET /endpoints/:id POST /endpoint PUT /endpoint/:id DELETE /endpoint/:id - Todo
GET /todos GET /todos/:id POST /todos PUT /todos/:id DELETE /todos/:id
Every time we create, update and delete a todo item, we would generate the following events — todo.created, todo.updated, and todo.deleted respectively.
Let’s Build Our API
Project Setup
laravel new convoy-todo-api && cd convoy-todo-apiEndpoints API
<?php namespace App\Http\Controllers; use App\Models\Endpoint; use Convoy\Convoy; use Illuminate\Http\Request; class EndpointController extends Controller { protected $convoy; public function __construct() { $this->convoy = new Convoy(['api_key' => env('CONVOY_API_KEY'), 'project_id' => env('CONVOY_PROJECT_ID')]); } /** * Display a listing of the resource. * * @return \Illuminate\Http\Response */ public function index() { $endpoints = Endpoint::all(); return response()->json($endpoints); } /** * Store a newly created resource in storage. * * @param \Illuminate\Http\Request $request * @return \Illuminate\Http\Response */ public function store(Request $request) { $request->validate([ 'url' => 'required', 'user_id' => 'required' ]); $endpointData = [ 'name' => 'endpoint laravel', 'description' => 'default endpoint', 'url' => $request->url ]; $response = $this->convoy->endpoints()->create($endpointData, []); $endpoint = Endpoint::create([ 'convoy_id' => $response['data']['uid'], 'user_id' => $request->user_id, 'url' => $request->url, ]); return response()->json($endpoint, 201); } /** * Display the specified resource. * * @param int $id * @return \Illuminate\Http\Response */ public function show(Endpoint $endpoint) { return response()->json($endpoint); } /** * Update the specified resource in storage. * * @param \Illuminate\Http\Request $request * @param int $id * @return \Illuminate\Http\Response */ public function update(Request $request, Endpoint $endpoint) { $request->validate(['url' => 'required']); //update on convoy $this->convoy->endpoints()->update($endpoint->convoy_id, [ 'name' => "endpoint-{$endpoint->id}", 'description' => 'default endpoint', 'url' => $request->url ]); $endpoint->update([ 'user_id' => $request->user_id, 'url' => $request->url, ]); return response()->json($endpoint); } /** * Remove the specified resource from storage. * * @param int $id * @return \Illuminate\Http\Response */ public function destroy(Endpoint $endpoint) { $this->convoy->endpoints()->delete($endpoint->convoy_id); $endpoint->delete(); return response()->json(); } }Todos API
<?php namespace App\Http\Controllers; use App\Models\Todo; use Convoy\Convoy; use Illuminate\Http\Request; class TodoController extends Controller { protected $convoy; public function __construct() { $this->convoy = new Convoy(['api_key' => env('CONVOY_API_KEY'), 'project_id' => env('CONVOY_PROJECT_ID')]); } /** * Display a listing of the resource. * * @return \Illuminate\Http\Response */ public function index() { $todos = Todo::all(); return response()->json($todos); } /** * Store a newly created resource in storage. * * @param \Illuminate\Http\Request $request * @return \Illuminate\Http\Response */ public function store(Request $request) { $validated = $request->validate([ 'title' => 'required', 'date' => 'required', 'user_id' => 'required' ]); $todo = Todo::create($validated); $this->sendWebhookEvent('todo.created', $todo); return response()->json($todo); } /** * Display the specified resource. * * @param int $id * @return \Illuminate\Http\Response */ public function show(Todo $todo) { return response()->json($todo); } /** * Update the specified resource in storage. * * @param \Illuminate\Http\Request $request * @param int $id * @return \Illuminate\Http\Response */ public function update(Request $request, Todo $todo) { $validated = $request->validate([ 'title' => 'required', 'date' => 'required', 'user_id' => 'required' ]); $todo->update($validated); $todo->fresh(); $this->sendWebhookEvent('todo.updated', $todo); return response()->json($todo); } /** * Remove the specified resource from storage. * * @param int $id * @return \Illuminate\Http\Response */ public function destroy(Todo $todo) { $todo->delete(); $this->sendWebhookEvent('todo.deleted', $todo); return response()->json(); } private function sendWebhookEvent(string $eventType, Todo $todo) { $this->convoy->events()->create([ 'endpoint_id' => $todo->user->endpoint->convoy_id, 'event_type' => $eventType, 'data' => [ 'event_type' => $eventType, 'data' => [ 'id' => $todo->id, 'user_id' => $todo->user_id, 'title' => $todo->title, 'date' => $todo->date, 'created_at' => $todo->created_at, 'updated_at' => $todo->updated_at, ], ] ]); return; } }
Publish Webhook Events
It’s time to publish your first webhook!
To begin, we start our laravel app
$ php artisan serveSecond, we create an endpoint with the cURL command below:
$ curl --request POST \ --url "localhost:8000/endpoints" \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -d '{ "user_id": "1", "url": "https://webhook.site/f60fa8c4-6f69-4447-bf02-ac5d317aa4ca" }'Finally, we create a Todo item, that in turn generates the webhook item. Let's use the cURL command below:
curl --request POST \ --url "localhost:8000/todos' \ -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \ -d '{ "title": "Complete Laravel Guide", "date": "2022-11-28", "user_id": "1" }'The API returns a successful response:
{ "id": 4, "title": "Complete Laravel Guide", "date": "2022-12-02", "user_id": 1, "created_at": "2022-12-02T06:16:50.000000Z", "updated_at": "2022-12-02T06:16:50.000000Z" }
Let’s see our event deliveries dashboard.
Let’s also see our webhooks endpoint
Appendix
- In production environments, Endpoints should be scoped to each user/business/customer or whatever makes sense in your case because at the point of generating webhooks
- Users can supply their endpoints through multiple means — your dashboard, the portal link
- In this article, we publish webhooks in our controllers, in an ideal production environment, you should publish them from your workers.
Conclusion
Convoy provides the ability the send webhooks to one endpoint as well as multiple endpoints. In this article, you learned how to send webhooks from a Laravel API. We hope you enjoyed reading this, and you get to try it out and give us some feedback on slack!
