Webhook: What Are Webhook and How Do They Work?

Introduction to webhook

In today’s highly connected online world, nothing can function optimally in isolation. Achieving a task (almost) always involves the participation of more than one entity. E-commerce apps need to communicate with payment systems, payment systems need to communicate with banking systems, banking systems need to communicate with customer accounts…do you see the pattern?

The ability of independent online systems to communicate with one another and share data is the core of what makes online services valuable today. In this post, will look at webhooks. A webhook is one of the many ways to facilitate communication between online services and by the end of this post, you will fully understand what webhooks are, how they work, and when to use them.

An Overview : What is a webhook?

A webhook is an HTTP request, triggered by an event in a source system and sent to a destination system, often with a payload of data. Webhooks are automated, in other words, they are automatically sent out when their event is fired in the source system.

This provides a way for one system (the source) to “speak” (HTTP request) to another system (the destination) when an event occurs, and share information (request payload) about the event that occurred.