🛠️Webhooks

What's a Webhook?

Webhooks are a powerful tool that gives you programmability for your alerts. A webhook is a URL that expects to be delivered a data payload for processing. In terms of Alertcaster, this means you can choose to get a machine readable payload at the URL of your choice.

This might sound complicated, but as you'll see below there are many services (some free) that allow you to easily get your own webhook URL and configure the processing to get your alert data wherever you like it.

Matt Galligan (of XMTP) open sourced an alternate Pipedream workflow that delivers casts as beautiful messages in Slack using Alertcaster webhooks.

What can I do with a Webhook?

You can get as-it-happens alerts delivered to Slack, Airtable, or thousands of other services. Here's an example of an alert being delivered to Slack using Pipedream:

Beyond Slack, here's a list from Pipedream of all the apps that can be automated using webhooks: https://pipedream.com/explore.

Getting Started

Get an automation service account

There are many services that allow you to easily set up automations using webhooks. Here are a few:

We recommend choosing Pipedream or Make.com because they have full featured low-use free accounts that support webhooks and Zapier and Ifttt do not.

For this example, we will show you how to set up a webhook alert with Pipedream.

Create a new workflow

Create a new workflow and select New HTTP/Webhook Requests as your Trigger.

Accept the defaults and click save and continue.

Pipedream displays your new Webhook URL.

Click the copy button next to your Pipedream webhook URL and paste it into the webhook URL field in your Alertcaster alert. From Alertcaster, click Test to send a sample payload to your Pipedream webhook URL. If all is working properly, you will see 'Success!' appear below your URL.

Select OK to save your alert and make it active.

Pipedream should have seen your test payload, which shows up as a POST event. Select it.

Click 'Continue' to finish setting up your Trigger and to move on to your setting up your Action.

Set up your Webhook Action

Now that we have a trigger set up, it's time to decide what Pipedream should do with the data it receives. We need to create an Action. Let's pick 'Send Message to Slack'.

Connect your Slack account, use Alertcaster as the Bot username, and select which public channel messages will be published to.

Finally, configure your message using the fields from the data payload Alertcaster sent. We recommend the below as a nice, easy-to-read format:

Once you're done, you can use the Test button to send a test message to Slack to see if it looks as you expect. Both the Test button in your Pipedream action and the Test button in your Alertcaster alert will work.

NOTE: if you want a clickable link to open casts in the Farcaster apps, you'll need to use Alertcaster's redirector (http://fc.alertcaster.xyz). Your link should be configured exactly as the picture above. The URL must be HTTP because the Farcaster apps do not support HTTPS and the link must end in '/null' or links won't open in the mobile app.

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