Can I create my own webhook?
Yes, and the work splits in two. Creating a webhook receiver means standing up an HTTP endpoint that accepts POST requests and verifies a signature, which is an afternoon of work. Creating a webhook sender means signing every request, retrying the failures, and keeping a delivery log, which is a system rather than an endpoint.
Which side are you building?
The word "webhook" covers both halves of the same exchange, so the first question is which end is yours. If another service already sends events and you want to act on them, you are building a receiver and the provider dictates the format. If your own product needs to notify customers when something happens, you are building a sender and you own every design decision, including the ones you will regret later.
There is a third case worth naming, because it is what most people mean when they type this question: creating an incoming webhook URL inside an app you already use. That is a menu click, not a project, and the section below covers it.
Creating a webhook receiver
A receiver is a normal HTTP route that accepts POST and returns a status code. Four things separate one that works from one that wakes you up at night.
Verify the signature before trusting anything. Providers following the Standard Webhooks specification send webhook-id, webhook-timestamp, and webhook-signature headers, and you recompute an HMAC-SHA256 over the raw body to check it. The webhook signature page walks through the exact computation, including why verifying against re-serialized JSON always fails.
Answer fast and work later. Providers do not wait long: Stripe cuts a delivery off at 20 seconds, GitHub at 10, Shopify at 5. Write the event to a queue, return 200, and process it in a background worker.
Expect duplicates. Retries mean the same event will arrive twice eventually, so store the event ID and skip repeats, which is the whole point of idempotency. Do not assume ordering either.
Give yourself a public URL during development. A tunnel forwards real deliveries to your laptop, which is covered in our webhook testing guide. For a full walkthrough, start with your first webhook endpoint.
Creating a webhook sender
Sending is where the scope grows. A first version is twenty lines: serialize the event, sign it, POST it. Then production arrives and you need retries with exponential backoff and jitter, commonly around eight attempts spread over 24 hours, plus a dead letter queue for the events that exhaust them. You need a delivery log your support team can search per endpoint, because "did you send it?" is the question every integration ticket starts with.
You also need per-endpoint concurrency limits so one slow customer cannot delay everyone else, secret rotation that does not break live integrations, and SSRF protection, since customers hand you arbitrary URLs and some of them will point at your own internal network. Our guide to building a webhook sender builds this up in Python, and sending best practices covers the operational decisions.
Creating a webhook in Slack, Discord, or Teams
If you only need to post messages into a chat channel, you do not write any code at all. These apps generate an incoming webhook URL for you, and posting a JSON body to it puts a message in the channel. We have step-by-step instructions for Slack, Discord, and Microsoft Teams.
Treat the URL that comes back as a credential. It carries no other authentication, so anyone who has it can post to your channel. Keep it in a secrets manager, out of client-side code, and out of version control.
When building your own stops paying off
Build the receiver. It is small, it belongs in your codebase, and no vendor can own it for you.
The sender is the honest decision. If you send a few thousand events a day to endpoints you control, your own code is fine. If you send events to customer-controlled endpoints, the work is not the POST, it is the retry schedule, the delivery history, the endpoint management UI, the fan-out under load, and the support burden when any of them misbehave. That is a team's ongoing commitment, and why webhooks as a service makes the case in more detail. Svix provides that layer, including signing, retries, and per-message delivery logs, so the part you build is the event itself.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a server to create a webhook?
To receive webhooks you need something publicly reachable: a server, a serverless function, or a tunnel to your laptop during development. To send them you need somewhere to run a background worker, because retries have to keep happening after the original request is finished.
Can I create a webhook without writing code?
Yes. Slack, Discord, and Microsoft Teams generate incoming webhook URLs from their settings pages, Google Apps Script can send and receive them from a spreadsheet, and most automation tools expose a webhook trigger. All of these are receivers or one-way senders, not a system for delivering events to your own customers.
How long does it take to build a webhook sender?
A signed POST with retries takes a day. The rest, meaning delivery logs, a dead letter queue, endpoint management, secret rotation, rate limiting, and fan-out under load, is measured in engineer months and keeps needing attention as your event volume grows.
Ready to send webhooks?
Svix handles signing, retries, rate limiting, and delivery observability for the webhooks you send to your users, so your team can stay focused on your product.
Start sending webhooks with Svix or read the build vs. buy analysis