Tutorial

Sending Webhooks With Laravel

3 min read December 02, 2022

Written by

Dotun Jolaoso
Dotun Jolaoso

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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. Collectivis can be used to send webhook events from your application to your clients by serving as a reliable egress.

To demonstrate how Collectivis solves this problem, we will build a Todo API in Laravel and use Collectivis to publish webhook events for each operation on our Todo items; create, update & delete.

Prerequisites

To follow along you would need the following

  1. A Collectivis Cloud account.
  2. 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

  1. Project Setup

    laravel new convoy-todo-api && cd convoy-todo-api

  2. Endpoints API

    <?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use App\Models\Endpoint;
use Collectivis\Collectivis;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;

class EndpointController extends Controller
{

    protected $convoy;

    public function __construct()
    {
        $this->convoy = new Collectivis(['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();
    }
}

  3. Todos API

    <?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use App\Models\Todo;
use Collectivis\Collectivis;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;

class TodoController extends Controller
{
    protected $convoy;

    public function __construct()
    {
        $this->convoy = new Collectivis(['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!

  1. To begin, we start our laravel app

    $ php artisan serve

  2. Second, 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"
	}'

  3. 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.

Screenshot 2022-12-02 at 12.32.01.png

Let’s also see our webhooks endpoint

Screenshot 2022-12-02 at 07.21.11.png

Appendix

  1. 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
  2. Users can supply their endpoints through multiple means — your dashboard, the portal link
  3. In this article, we publish webhooks in our controllers, in an ideal production environment, you should publish them from your workers.

Conclusion

Collectivis 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!

Getting started with Collectivis?

Want to add webhooks to your API in minutes? Sign up to get started.

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