---
title: 'Receive Webhooks Behind the Firewall With Svix Bridge'
authors: ['jonas']
date: 2025-10-14T13:00:00
tags: ['technical', 'webhooks', 'tutorial']
summary: "How Polling Endpoints and Svix Bridge enable convenient receiving of webhooks for users that can't provide a public HTTP endpoint."
---

![Cover image](./cover.png)

<div className="lead">
  Svix is the enterprise ready webhooks sending service. With Svix, you can build a secure,
  reliable, and scalable webhook platform in minutes. Looking to send webhooks?{' '}
  <a href="https://www.svix.com">Give it a try!</a>
</div>

Webhooks are a great way to notify your users of real-time events, but they assume the user
receiving the notification has a server that can accept HTTP requests on the public internet.
We've previously covered how this can be a problem when there are security rules prohibiting this,
and how Polling Endpoints can help bridge this gap in our
[Ingest + Polling Endpoints tutorial][ingest-polling]. This article will explain how your users
are able to do the same thing without Ingest, and even without writing any code themselves, if you
use Svix for sending webhooks.

[ingest-polling]: https://www.svix.com/blog/reliable-webhook-delivery-anywhere-no-open-ports-no-delayed-messages/

## Preparation

There is only one prerequisite, and that is enabling Polling Endpoints, which is a part of the
"Advanced endpoint types" setting.

![Screenshot of the general settings in the Svix dashboard, With "Advanced endpoint types" toggled on](./advanced-endpoint-types.png)

The remaining setup is done on the receiving side, in the App Portal:

## Setting up a Polling Endpoint

With advanced endpoint types enabled, when creating a new endpoint, your customers will be able to
select the Polling Endpoint option from this dropdown:

![Screenshot highlighting the top-right endpoint type dropdown on the new endpoint page](./endpoint-type-dropdown-1.png)
![Screenshot highlighting the Polling Endpoint type in the dropdown once opened](./endpoint-type-dropdown-2.png)

Once the endpoint is created, they will see usage instructions, including for Svix Bridge.
In addition to the http output shown there, they can also forward messages from the Polling Endpoint
to other destinations, like for example a Kafka instance:

```yaml
receivers:
  - name: 'msg-poller-to-kafka'
    input:
      type: 'svix-message-poller'
      consumer_id: 'svix-bridge-1'
      app_id: 'app_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'
      sink_id: 'poll_yyy'
      token: 'sk_poll_*****.eu'
    output:
      type: 'kafka'
      kafka_bootstrap_brokers: 'kafka.local:9094'
      kafka_topic: 'my_bridged_events'
      kafka_security_protocol: 'sasl_ssl'
      kafka_sasl_username: 'user'
      kafka_sasl_password: 'pass'
```

A docker image for bridge is available [on Docker Hub](https://hub.docker.com/r/svix/svix-bridge),
to make it easy to deploy.

## What if outgoing HTTP requests are also restricted?

Using our Polling Endpoint, your customers can avoid exposing any part of their private network to
the open internet. However, what if there is also a proxy in place that any requests to the public
internet have to go through? This, too, is just a matter of configuration. Taking the previous kafka
example, here is how it would look with the polling endpoint requests going through an HTTP
proxy:

```yaml
receivers:
  - name: 'msg-proxied-poller-to-kafka'
    input:
      type: 'svix-message-poller'
      consumer_id: 'svix-bridge-1'
      app_id: 'app_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'
      sink_id: 'poll_yyy'
      token: 'sk_poll_*****.eu'
      # New: Svix API client configuration
      svix_options:
        proxy_address: 'http://my-proxy.local:8080'
    output:
      type: 'kafka'
      kafka_bootstrap_brokers: 'kafka.local:9094'
      kafka_topic: 'my_bridged_events'
      kafka_security_protocol: 'sasl_ssl'
      kafka_sasl_username: 'user'
      kafka_sasl_password: 'pass'
```

In addition to HTTP proxies, SOCKS5 proxies are also supported through a `socks5://` URL, or
`socks5h://` to also delegate hostname resolution to the proxy.

## Conclusion

Networks with high security requirements can make it hard to receive real-time notifications from
outside the network. Svix gives you all the tools you need to tackle this challenge without
compromising security.

---

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