Receive and test webhooks on localhost

Updated on Aug 25, 2024 · 3 mins read

Webhooks are an essential part of modern web development, enabling web applications to receive and respond to real-time events and data from other services and platforms. However, testing and developing webhooks can be challenging, especially if you need to receive them on a local development server. In this blog post, we will explore how to use pinggy to receive webhooks on your local development environment.

Overview of pinggy.io

Before jumping in we will have a brief overview of Pinggy.

Pinggy.io is a tunneling solution that provides a public address to reach your local computer’s server, even if it’s behind a firewall or NAT. This can be accomplished with a single command, without the need for any downloads. Using the pinggy command, users can access your locally hosted website or application without having to configure the cloud, perform port forwarding, DNS setup, or VPN connections.

Getting started with Pinggy

You do not need to do anything to get started. For better features you might want to sign in to https://pinggy.io later.

Step 1 - Start a pinggy localhost tunnel

On you terminal type:

ssh -p 443 -R0:localhost:3000 a.pinggy.io

This will give you a public url such as:

https://ranxxxxydxmwb.a.pinggy.link

Now that you have pinggy running, you can use it to receive webhooks from other services to localhost:3000. To do this, you will need to configure the external service to send webhooks to your pinggy URL. You can change the port from 3000 to any port of your choice.

Step 2 - There is no step 2. Just test.

For example, if you are testing a webhook integration with Stripe, you would log into your Stripe account, navigate to the webhook settings, and enter your pinggy URL as the webhook endpoint. Stripe will then send webhook events to your pinggy URL, which will be forwarded to your local development server.

Debugging with pinggy [coming soon]

One of the benefits of using Pinggy is that it will allow you to see the webhook requests that are being sent to your local server. When a webhook event is received, Pinggy will log the request details in your terminal, including the request method, URL, headers, and body.

This can be incredibly useful for debugging and troubleshooting webhook integrations, as it allows you to see exactly what data is being sent to your server and how it is being processed.

Conclusion

In conclusion, pinggy is a powerful tool for testing and developing webhooks on your local development environment. By exposing your local server to the internet, pinggy allows external services to send data to your server in real-time, making it easy to test and debug webhook integrations. With pinggy, you can streamline your webhook development workflow and build more robust and reliable webhook integrations.