In my last post I showed how to send a Simple Notification Service (SNS) message to an email endpoint. Now I show how to easily add a WebHook endpoint. WebHooks are a design pattern using an HTTP POST to send a notification to a URL which the “subscriber” has registered with the service. WebHooks are being used in an increasing number of web APIs and there is an interesting interview with Jeff Lindsay on this topic at IT Conversations.

A useful test platform for WebHooks is PostBin.org. Simply click on the “Make a PostBin” button and you will be presented with a new URL for your notification messages – something like “http://www.postbin.org/1hf0jlo“. This is the URL you register with SNS.

Turning to the SNS dashboard, add a new subscription to a topic that you’ve already configured in SNS. Specify protocol “HTTP” and enter the PostBin URL as the endpoint. SNS will post a confirmation message to this URL before you can send through messages.

Go back to your PostBin URL and you should see the confirmation message.

Buried in the message is the SubscribeURL which you need to hit in order to confirm the subscription. I pasted it into notepad and edited “cleaned up” the URL before pasting it into a browser. This confirms the subscription with SNS.

Now back in the SNS Dashboard you can send a new message. In my case, since I still have my email endpoint, the same message is sent to both the email and the WebHook endpoints…thus:

…and thus: