Webhooks

Overview

Envoy uses webhooks to notify your application when an event happens. Webhooks are particularly useful for asynchronous events like when a visitor signs in or an invite is created. You can listen for events on your Envoy account so your integration can automatically trigger actions.

Webhooks are like a phone number that Envoy calls to notify you when something happens in your account. The webhook endpoint is the person answering the call and who takes actions based upon the specific information it receives.

Your webhook endpoint is code on your server that is publicly accessible and can ingest and process the incoming requests (e.g., https://example.com/webhooks).

When to use webhooks

Many events that occur within Envoy are asynchronous: happening at a later time and not directly in response to your app.

Most commonly these involve:

• A person signs-in
• An invite is sent

Envoy can notify your app about changes to the status of an object so your app can take subsequent steps.

The specific actions your webhook endpoint may take is based on the Envoy event you have registered and the code you write to handle the event.

Here are a few examples of things you can do with webhooks

• Store an employee or visitor record in your database when a person signs-in
• Send an email survey to a person after they've visited your office
• Store a record of visitors that have been denied entry to your office
• Send a Slack message when a user has been denied entry

Webhooks are also great for providing state and API responses to services or systems that use Envoy for data replication, analytics, or alerting.