REST Hooks itself is not a specification, it is a collection of patterns that treat webhooks like subscriptions. These subscriptions are manipulated via a REST API just like any other resource. That's it. Really.
In this documentation you'll find information on creating the minimum implementation as well as diving deeper into specific features that cover quite a few topics and their best practices within the pattern of REST Hooks. You can pick and choose from these topics and implement what makes sense for your API.
To comply with the REST Hooks pattern, there is a minimum set of pieces you'll need to add to have a working implementation. This article will outline those minimums:
Retries, intent and identity verification, batching and other components are optional and vary wildly between implementations.
Highly dependent on your database selection, this first requirement is the foundation by which the subscriptions are managed. At the most basic level, a persisted subscription only really needs the following fields:
It is wise to make sure you index both the event and user relationship so subscription lookups are performant.
Also dependent on your API implementation, this allows anyone with normal API access to manipulate their subscriptions like any other resource on your API. For example, if you already have a REST API, the most common and logical solution is another resource:
| Method | Route | About |
|---|---|---|
| GET | /api/v1/subscription/ | list subscriptions |
| POST | /api/v1/subscription/ | create a subscription |
| GET | /api/v1/subscription/:id/ | get a subscription |
| PUT | /api/v1/subscription/:id/ | update a subscription |
| DELETE | /api/v1/subscription/:id/ | delete a subscription |
These would simply manipulate the resources like any other REST endpoint, but with the added benefit that subscriptions have one side effect: their existence will cause webhooks be sent to the target URL when an event happens for that account.
This is an improvement over manually managed webhooks URLs as it gives interested third party applications the opportunity to dynamically create and update integrations that perform in near-real time functions.
Next up would be enumerating and implementing each event type you'd like your REST Hooks subscription system to support. Each event type needs two things:
For starters, we recommend create, update and delete events on your most popular resources. For example, if you had contact and deal resources, you'd define and implement contact.create, contact.update, contact.delete, deal.create, etc… events.
The payload that you build for each record in your REST API would match exactly your API's representation of the same object. That makes it easy to map REST resources to hook resources and vice versa.
Now that you have all the other pieces in place, the only thing left to do is add the actual mechanism to POST or otherwise deliver the payload for each event to the proper target URL for each matching subscription.
We generally recommend some sort of delayed task implementation (we detail more performance considerations here) but in its simplest form inline hook delivery will get the job done.