How to create webhook discord

Guide To Discord Webhooks Features And Best Practices

Fikayo Adepoju Oreoluwa

In our Discord webhook series, we have taken a look at the first steps required to get started with Discord webhooks. We also got some hands-on experience by setting up Discord webhooks using the Discord web interface and the Discord webhooks API.

Now that we have all the Discord webhooks basics covered, we will take a look at best practices that help us deploy reliable, secure, and scalable Discord webhooks in production environments.

If you’re still new to Discord webhooks, I advise that you check out the beginner articles linked above before you proceed with this one. However, if you understand how Discord webhooks work and have already published at least one, let’s get started.

How to Get Started with Discord Webhooks

Tutorial: How to Configure Discord Webhooks Using the Admin Interface

Learn how to create, edit, and delete a discord webhook using the Settings page with the help of an example detailed step-by-step

Tutorial: How to Configure Discord Webhooks Using the API

Learn how to use Discord’s API to create a webhook integration. Follow a step-by-step tutorial of an example where we set up a Discord bot to receive notification from GitHub.

Discord webhook features

Before we get into the best practices, let’s get some familiarity with the features of Discord webhooks. This will help you understand some of the considerations we will take into account when discussing the best practices later on.

Below is a table that displays Discord webhook features and how they each relate to one or more best practices.

Now that we have a solid understanding of the Discord webhook features, we can go ahead and discuss best practices for using Discord webhooks in our production infrastructure.

Recommended best practices for using Discord webhooks

Local troubleshooting and testing

Unlike GitHub and Slack, which have documented webhook URL formats that allow Discord to recognize and parse their payloads, Discord webhook payloads must be sent in a specific format. If this message format is not adhered to, Discord will reject the webhook and your message will not get delivered to your Discord channel.

The best way to ensure that you’re always sending the right type of message to Discord is to properly test your communication setup from source to Discord.

Imagine a situation where you need to communicate the build status of your deployment pipeline on a CI/CD server, like CircleCI, to Discord. So, like this guy, you write a script within your build pipeline to communicate the success or failure of the build to Discord using a Discord webhook. These build status messages are to be sent to your team’s Discord channel where an action will be taken if a failure message is received. If bugs are present in the script that sends the status of the build and it sends the wrong message format to Discord, Discord will reject the webhook.

This means that your build status notification will not be received in the channel. In the case of a failed build, such an error will prevent the team from receiving the failure notification and the situation will not be addressed. This is not a situation you want to put your team in.

This type of unwanted scenario is exactly why you should properly test and troubleshoot the code you write to send messages to a Discord channel through a Discord webhook.

Here are some of the types of tests you should consider for your webhook setup:

The above list is not exhaustive; however, it should serve as a guide for the type of checks you should be performing when testing your Discord webhook setup.

Asynchronous processing to ensure reliability

For high-volume users, i.e. your Discord webhook endpoint is going to be receiving a lot of requests, and most of them concurrently, synchronous processing (the default) is not the best strategy for you.

The Discord API is rate-limited to ensure that the service is not overloaded with requests. Webhook URL endpoints are part of the Discord API and have at least the Discord API global rate limit applied. Once this limit is exceeded by your requests, Discord will stop processing your webhooks or ban your client.

I was speaking to a CircleCI staff member recently and he revealed to me that some companies process tens of thousands of builds concurrently. Going by the previous example of receiving build status messages in a Discord channel, such a high number of concurrent builds has the potential to hit Discord rate limits. This is where asynchronous processing comes in.

With asynchronous processing, you can ingest all the status messages from CircleCI and relay them to Discord at a rate that will not exceed its API limits. This helps your Discord webhook messaging setup so that it is elastic enough to withstand high volumes of requests.

One of the ways to introduce asynchronous processing into your Discord webhook setup is to use a message queue. Message queue frameworks like Kafka and RabbitMQ can be used to build a custom asynchronous processing system into your Discord webhooks by placing them between your message source (CircleCI in this example) and Discord. However, as efficient as this solution is, it is not an easy component to build and adds more complexity to your system.

If you want to build and scale fast, consider using Hookdeck’s webhook ingestion service. With Hookdeck, you can introduce asynchronous processing into your Discord webhooks setup in a matter of minutes.

Introduction to Messages Queues

Learn what are message queues, what are producers and consumers, the advantages of using message queues and what frameworks and services you can use to implement message queueing.

Logging for visibility and failure troubleshooting

Failure is inevitable when it comes to webhooks. No matter the amount of testing you have done, your webhooks can still fail due to factors mostly beyond your control.

Still using the build status example, let’s assume your Discord webhook is working fine and you’re successfully receiving your build messages in your Discord channel. Then suddenly, you resume work on a certain day only to realize that you’re no longer receiving messages, even as more builds are being processed. You assume that the issue is not from your code because you were receiving the messages up until today. However, this is just an assumption because you have no visibility into the webhook request process and Discord has no browsable log for webhooks. This type of blind spot is not healthy for a system that strives to be reliable.

To recover from failure, you need the ability to trace what the cause of the failure is. This can be achieved by logging the webhook request process. Tools like the ELK stack can be used to log and provide visibility into your webhook communication process. Zipkin is also a tool that can be used for HTTP request tracing, and provides visibility into the webhook request process.

Just like message queues, these logging frameworks require a good amount of expertise and time to set up. This is why Hookdeck comes bundled with logging capabilities. Hookdeck also gives you intuitive dashboards with information to troubleshoot any issues that arise with your Discord webhooks.

Failure recovery using a retry system

So what happens after you have looked through your logs to detect why your webhooks failed and the situation is now fixed? The webhooks that failed need to be re-forwarded to Discord to ensure that you’re capturing all the necessary information in your channel.

It is acceptable to have webhooks fail, but what is not acceptable is the inability to recover from failure. Thus, you need a system to automatically or manually retry all failed webhooks once the issue that caused them to fail has been fixed.

You may be asking, «what is so bad about missing a couple of messages?» Well, with our build status messaging example, this can be a major problem if some of those missed messages reflect failed builds. If you decide to skip them, they will not reach the team members who are supposed to act on them.

An automatic retry system will enable the Discord webhook messaging system to heal itself from disasters. A manual retry system will give you more control over which webhooks to retry and when to retry them.

A retry mechanism can be built by properly ingesting your webhooks, logging them to monitor their status, and writing application logic to resend failed webhooks.

A retry mechanism is another feature you get when using Hookdeck to process your webhooks. You can define when and how your failed webhooks should be retried automatically, and also manually trigger a webhook retry.

Secure your Discord webhook URL

One big problem Discord users have is message spamming, and having an exposed webhook URL doesn’t help matters. Discord webhook URLs have no authentication strategy, so if your webhook URL falls into the hands of an ill-intentioned individual, they can spam your channel with unwanted messages.

Thus, it is important that you only share your webhook URL with authorized members of your team and develop policies around protecting it from unwanted exposure. You can also make sure that members of your Discord channel who don’t work with webhooks do not have the MANAGE_WEBHOOKS permission.

If security is a very important part of your operations, I advise that you send your webhook requests to Discord through a proxy server. This proxy server will be the only entity that knows your Discord webhook URL. You can store the webhook URL as an environment variable on your proxy server. The proxy server also allows you to build security checks into how your webhook requests are made. Examples of such security controls are:

This way, only approved messages will be sent to your Discord channel.

Conclusion

Discord webhooks are very simple in design and work efficiently. The simplicity of this design often sacrifices a lot of standard software architecture characteristics like scalability, reliability, and security. The best practices we have discussed in this article allow you to build resilience into your Discord webhooks and ensure that you’re getting optimal performance.

Hookdeck takes away many of the worries that come with webhooks in production environments by helping you ingest and asynchronously process your webhooks, providing visibility with clear visualizations and helping you configure retry mechanisms that suit your needs. You can start with a free Hookdeck account today.

Try Hookdeck Today

Instantly & reliably manage
your webhooks

Related Guide s

How to Get Started with Discord Webhooks

Tutorial: How to Configure Discord Webhooks Using the Admin Interface

Learn how to create, edit, and delete a discord webhook using the Settings page with the help of an example detailed step-by-step

Tutorial: How to Configure Discord Webhooks Using the API

Learn how to use Discord’s API to create a webhook integration. Follow a step-by-step tutorial of an example where we set up a Discord bot to receive notification from GitHub.

How to get GitHub notifications on your Discord server.

GitHub provides us with a way to allow other applications such as discord to connect it and receive POST requests whenever any action is done on your repository.

This can be useful if you find the email notifications not as instant as you’d want them to be.

Prerequisites

1. Create the webhook

A webhook is basically a link that will allow other applications to post into discord.
To create a webhook, head into your server settings => integrations => New webhook

You can give your webhook a name and also choose which channel it will be posting to. You can click on Copy Webhook URL to copy the link which we are going to use on our GitHub repository.

2. Add Discord webhook to GitHub

After creating the webhook the next thing is to add it to your github repository from which you would like to get notifications.

Head over to your repo then settings => Webhooks => Add webhook

Paste the link we copied earlier from discord in the Payload URL and make sure to add /github at the end or it will not work.

Set the Content type to application/json and finally choose the events which should trigger the webhook. Personally, I want everything.

After you are done you can click the green button at the bottom labeled Add webhook to complete the process.

If you have done it correctly you should receive a similar notification to this;

3. Test the webhook

To test the webhook we can perform a simple action such as creating an issue on the repo which we just added the webhook.

Upon creating the issue. You should immediately receive a notification from discord on whatever device you have installed it on.

Thank You for reading❤️. If you have any questions feel free to drop them in the comments section below and I’ll be glad to answer them.

# Webhooks

Webhooks can send messages to a text channel without having to log in as a bot. They can also fetch, edit, and delete their own messages. There are a variety of methods in discord.js to interact with webhooks. In this section, you will learn how to create, fetch, edit, and use webhooks.

# What is a webhook

If you would like to read about using webhooks through the API without discord.js, you can read about them here

# Detecting webhook messages

If you would like to get the webhook object that sent the message, you can use Message#fetchWebhook()

# Fetching webhooks

Webhook fetching will always make use of collections and Promises. If you do not understand either concept, revise them, and then come back to this section. You can read about collections here, and Promises here and here

# Fetching all webhooks of a guild

If you would like to get all webhooks of a guild you can use Guild#fetchWebhooks()

# Fetching webhooks of a channel

Webhooks belonging to a channel can be fetched using TextChannel#fetchWebhooks()

open in new window on the Collection to get the webhook.

# Fetching a single webhook

# Using client

You can fetch a specific webhook using its id with Client#fetchWebhook()

# Using the WebhookClient constructor

If you are not using a bot client, you can get a webhook by creating a new instance of WebhookClient and passing the id and token into the constructor. These credentials do not require you to have a bot application, but it also offers limited information instead of fetching it using an authorized client.

You can also pass in just a url :

# Creating webhooks

# Creating webhooks through server settings

You can create webhooks directly through the Discord client. Go to Server Settings, and you will see an Integrations tab.

If you already have created a webhook, the webhooks tab will look like this; you will need to click the View Webhooks button.

Once you are there, click on the Create Webhook / New Webhook button; this will create a webhook. From here, you can edit the channel, the name, and the avatar. Copy the link, the first part is the id, and the second is the token.

# Creating webhooks with discord.js

Webhooks can be created with the TextChannel#createWebhook()

# Editing webhooks

You can edit Webhooks and WebhookClients to change their name, avatar, and channel using Webhook#edit()

# Using webhooks

# Sending messages

Webhooks, like bots, can send up to 10 embeds per message. They can also send attachments and normal content. The Webhook#send()

open in new window method used to send to a webhook is very similar to the method used for sending to a text channel. Webhooks can also choose how the username and avatar will appear when they send the message.

Example using a WebhookClient:

Try to find a webhook your bot knows the token for. This makes sure your bot can execute the webhook later on.

# Fetching messages

open in new window to fetch messages previously sent by the Webhook.

# Editing messages

open in new window to edit messages previously sent by the Webhook.

# Deleting messages

open in new window to delete messages previously sent by the Webhook.

# Resulting code

If you want to compare your code to the code we’ve constructed so far, you can review it over on the GitHub repository here

Birdie0 / ifttt-webhooks-extended-guide.md

⚠️ This gist is no longer updated! For maintained, improved and even more extended guide click here.

If you don’t know anything about JSON, please, spend some time on learning JSON structure.

Structure of Webhooks

Before using Webhooks you have to know the structure. All elements listed here are optional but you still need to use the content or embeds object at least once. This is the minimal requirement.

Example for a webhook

And how it looks

Account on IFTTT

Visit IFTTT and create an account (if you haven’t one).

Webhook on Discord

Creating an Applet

Birdie0 commented Mar 5, 2021 •

But is there any way to get message.id via api?

You need bot for that, like use method that returns array of messages from channel etc.

rajada1 commented Mar 5, 2021

Mas há alguma maneira de conseguir message.id via api?

Você precisa de bot para isso, como usar método que retorna matriz de mensagens do canal etc.

blackdackota commented Mar 22, 2021 •

So I learned some HTML and Python the last time I messaged you and I’m working on building the bot for what I talked to you about last time, (turns out you don’t need to login to see standings). I ran into a problem though I’m not sure how to solve. When I scrape the page I don’t get the full code from the website.

This is my code:

This is the output:

Process finished with exit code 0

Do you know how to solve this?

Birdie0 commented Mar 22, 2021

Here’s ReqBin example, there you can even get generated code for python etc. Request structure is simple:

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README.md

Originally part of JDA, this library provides easy to use bindings for the Discord Webhook API.

Here we will give a small overview of the proper usage and applicability of the resources provided by this library.

Documentation is available via the GitHub pages on this repository: Javadoc

Webhooks on discord are only capable of sending messages, nothing more. For anything else you either have to use OAuth2 or a bot account. This library does not provide any functionality for creating or modifying webhooks.

Creating a WebhookClient

Creating a WebhookCluster

You can use the webhook clients provided by this library to send messages in threads. There are two ways to accomplish this.

Set a thread id in the client builder to send all messages in that client to the thread:

Use onThread to create a client with a thread id and all other settings inherited:

All WebhookClient instances created with onThread will share the same thread pool used by the original client. This means that shutting down or closing any of the clients will also close all other clients associated with that underlying thread pool.

Since the clients use threads for sending messages you should close the client to end the threads. This can be ignored if a shared thread-pool is used between multiple clients but that pool has to be shutdown by the user accordingly.

By default, this library will log every exception encountered when sending a message using the SLF4J logger implementation. This can be configured using WebhookClient#setErrorHandler to custom behavior per client or WebhookClient#setDefaultErrorHandler for all clients.

This library also supports sending webhook messages with integration from other libraries such as