My Webhook Server

This repository has example code for setting up a webserver that accept webhooks. Webhooks are sent from NationBuilder to your webserver via HTTP POST requests.

Each server is setup to accept an HTTP POST request with a body containing the information for a person. An example request body is in the file person_created.json. That file has JSON in the same format set by NationBuilder for a webhook triggered when a person is created.

Examples are provided for: PHP, Ruby, and Go.

What the does the sample app do?

It reads the webhooks and stores the NationBuilder ID, name, email, and the number of times that person has been updated into a SQLite3 database. The list of people is then viewable on a another URL as a list of people with the fields: ID, name, email, updates

Starting the webhook servers

Starting the PHP server

To enable the bundled PHP on OSX, follow the instructions here.

And then, copy list_people.php and update_person.php to /Library/WebServer/Documents/

cd php
cp list_people.php update_person.php /Library/WebServer/Documents

Make the directory writeable so that the sqlite database file can be modified.

chmod a+w /Library/WebServer/Documents

In a browser, go here to list the people http://localhost/list_people

Starting the Ruby server

cd ruby
bundle install
ruby my_app.rb

In a browser, go here to list the people http://localhost:4567/list_people

Starting the Go server

cd go
go get code.google.com/p/gosqlite/sqlite
go run my_app.go

In a browser, go here to list the people http://localhost:4567/list_people

To test individual HTTP POST use curl(1)

Your web server is now ready to receive webhooks. You can simulate a webhook send out by NationBuilder using curl.

For Ruby and Go, use curl with this URL

curl -X POST -d @person_created.json http://localhost:4567/update_person

For PHP, use curl with this URL:

curl -X POST -d @person_created.json http://localhost/update_person

Connect webhook server to NationBuilder

For PHP, use this URL http://{your machine's external name}/update_person

For Ruby or Go, use this URL http://{your machine's external name}:4567/update_person

Read more about NationBuilder webhooks here

To benchmark

The script below uses ab - Apache HTTP server benchmarking tool - to test the webhooks.

Sqlite3 does not support concurrent writes. So, there will be no improvement with concurrency testing.

For testing, php server use:

./benchmark_php.sh

For testing, go or ruby server use:

./benchmark.sh

These benchmarks were run on a MacBook Pro, Mid 2012, 2.3 GHz Intel Core i7. Here is a summary of the data from {php, ruby, go}/benchmark_out.txt

Language	Requests per second
PHP	513.04
Ruby	236.55
Go	638.45