Webhook Patterns — When APIs Call YOU
Understand webhooks — what they are, how to receive them, verify their authenticity, handle failures, and build idempotent handlers.
Everything we've covered so far follows the same pattern: your code makes a request, and a server responds. You ask a question, you get an answer. Pull-based communication.
Webhooks flip this around. Instead of you asking "did anything happen?", the service tells you "something happened." Push-based communication. The API calls you.
This isn't a minor detail — it's a fundamentally different architecture, and it's how most real-world integrations work. Stripe tells you when a payment succeeds. Clerk tells you when a user signs up. GitHub tells you when a pull request is opened. Understanding webhooks is essential for building production applications.
How Webhooks Work
A webhook is an HTTP POST request that a service sends to your server when something happens. You register a URL (th
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