Webhooks are a mechanism to listen and react to events using an HTTP callback: an HTTP POST that occurs when an event occurs.It is an alternative to HTTP polling.
What is it?
Webhooks are a mechanism to listen and react to events using an HTTP callback: an HTTP POST that occurs when an event occurs.It is an alternative to HTTP polling.
Webhooks are a mean to extend the functionality of a service and a way to receive valuable information in near real-time, rather than continually polling a service for that data and receiving nothing valuable most of the time.
How does it work?
A web application implementing WebHooks will POST a message to a user-specified URL when certain events occur. For example, GitHub implements post-receive webhooks that allow users to integrate with a wide variety of services such as Twitter, Basecamp, or a custom script created by the user.
Related tags
- Use hooking for local hooking that does not use webhooks
- Use githooks for hooking of git events. Use githooks together with webhooks only for git services that use webhooks as a replacement for githooks.
- Use for webhooks used on Github as alternative to githooks.
- Prefer more specific tags for questions about the use of webhooks in the context of spefic APIS, such as github-webhook, facebook-webhooks, etc...
See also
- Webhook on Wikipedia
