Retries on webhooks

Integrations & API
1

I am looking at integrating ghost with a couple of our other systems (civicrm and whatcounts) and one thing that is critical is that when a member signs up or leaves we update our other systems.

It looks like ghost’s webhooks silently fail rather than retrying on failure (which seems like a misfeature given that machines can be down, networks can be unreliable and so on).

I could poll the admin API to find new members but of course that wouldn’t tell me about members who have left. We aren’t self hosting for now so I can’t just poke round in the database (and that wouldn’t seem the right way to do things anyway).

I’m wondering what other people do when they need webhooks but also want them to be somewhat fault tolerant for example by retrying a few times on failure? Or is there something else that makes more sense for this use case.

2

It looks like there isn’t a persistent retry mechanism, but Ghost will try up to 5 times over a span of 2 seconds to deliver a webhook:

3

Thanks for checking the code! On the whole I imagine that may somewhat help with very temporary network issues, but webhooks will still fail in other scenarios where the endpoint’s unavailable for more than 2 seconds. I feel sure other folks must have a way of dealing with this.