hookee - command line webhooks, on demand¶
hookee
is a utility that provides command line webhooks, on demand! Dump useful request data to the
console, process requests and responses, customize response data, and configure hookee
and its routes
further in any number of ways through custom plugins.
Installation¶
hookee
is available on PyPI and can be installed
using pip
:
pip install hookee
or conda
:
conda install -c conda-forge hookee
That’s it! hookee
is now available as a Python package is available from the command line.
Basic Usage¶
hookee
makes it easy to get webhooks on the fly right from the console. Simply start it like this:
hookee start
With its default configuration, this will start a server on port 8000, open a ngrok tunnel
using pyngrok, and mount a URL at /webhook
. Sending any
request to the /webhook
endpoint will dump request and response data to the console.
hookee
can be configured in a number of ways to quickly and easily tweak request and response data. For example,
here we are customizing the response body from /webhook
using the --response
arg.
hookee --response "<Response>Ok</Response>" --content-type application/xml
To see the ways hookee
can be tweaked right from the console, view its documented args and commands like this:
hookee --help
Configuration¶
Enabling/Disabling Plugins¶
Out of the box, a Flask Blueprint will
mount a URL at /webhook
, and default plugins for dumping request data to the console and echoing back the request
body as the response will be enabled.
Plugins can be enabled and disabled easily from the command line. Here we are disabling the default response plugin in favor of our own JSON response plugin:
hookee disable-plugin response_echo
hookee enable-plugin my_json_plugin
hookee start
Custom request or response plugins can be built and, when enabled, the default /webhook
endpoint will utilize
them. Or we can add additional Blueprint plugins to register endpoints of our own—see the Plugins section
below for documentation on plugin development.
Changing the Defaults¶
If we find ourselves continually reusing the same args to configure hookee
when starting it, we can instead just
updated the config’s defaults. For example, if we always want to reuse the same ngrok
endpoint:
hookee --subdomain my_domain --region eu
We can update these defaults like this:
hookee update-config subdomain my_domain
hookee update-config region eu
From now on, these args are no longer necessary when starting hookee
:
hookee
Customizing the Response¶
If we don’t want to bother with building our own plugins, the response from /webhook
and be customized right from
the command line with the --response
arg.
hookee --response "<Response>Ok</Response>" --content-type application/xml
This approach can be particularly useful in tutorials where we want to quickly allow a developer to see and interact
with webhooks from our service before they’ve done any actual integration with our service themselves—all they would
have to do is copy and paste a simple hookee
command like the one shown above.
As with any config, if we find ourselves continually passing this response to hookee
every time we run it, we can
make it the default:
hookee update-config response "<Response>Ok</Response>"
hookee update-config content-type application/xml
If we want a bit more flexibility, we can use --response-script
to inject any script that implements
run(request, response)
. So, for example, if we have my_response_script.py
that builds a simple
Flask XML response:
from flask import current_app
def run(request, response):
return current_app.response_class(
"<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?><Response>Ok</Response>",
mimetype="application/xml",
)
We can utilize it with:
hookee --response-script my_response_script.py
We can do the same with the --request-script
arg.
Plugins¶
hookee
comes with several built-in plugins that dump request and response data to the console and return a response
from /webhook
. We can also build our own plugins and store them in the config’s plugins_dir
(which defaults to
~/.config/hookee/plugins
).
Plugins have a simple structure. Every plugin must define a plugin_type
, and valid values are:
blueprint
request
response
All plugin types can optionally implement setup(hookee_manager)
, which will be called on the plugin when it is
first loaded. References to PluginManager
, PrintUtil
, and more
can be access from the passed in HookeeManager
.
Plugins can also optionally define a description
, which will be output when listing available and enabled plugins.
Blueprint Plugins¶
A Blueprint plugin must define blueprint = Blueprint("<plugin_name>", __name__)
. Past that, simply implement
a Flask Blueprint. Any defined route
in this Blueprint, when the plugin is enabled, will be added to hookee
.
For a Blueprint plugin to leverage enabled request and response plugins the same way the default /webhook
route
does, we can call hookee.pluginmanager.PluginManager.run_request_plugins
and
hookee.pluginmanager.PluginManager.run_response_plugins
Request and Response Plugins¶
Request and response plugins are nearly identical to each other, they only differ in one arg. A request plugin
must implement run(request)
(and return the request
), and a response plugin must implement
run(request, response)
(and return the response
).
The built-in plugins that come with hookee may
be a useful reference when developing new plugins for hookee
.
Integrating with hookee
¶
We can also integrate with hookee
instead of using its command line interface.
HookeeManager
is a good starting point for custom integrations. If we still want
access to the output that would otherwise have gone to the console (for instance, request data dumped from plugins),
we can setup the logger. For example, this would add a handler
to the hookee
logger that logs output back to the console:
import logging
logger = logging.getLogger("hookee")
logger.setLevel(logging.INFO)
logger.addHandler(logging.StreamHandler())
Dive Deeper¶
Under the hood, hookee
uses Flask as its server and
pyngrok to open and manage its tunnel. Being familiar with these
two packages would allow hookee
to be configured and extended further.
For more advanced hookee
usage, its own API documentation is also available.
Contributing¶
If you find issues, report them on GitHub.
If you would like to contribute to the code, the process is pretty simple:
Familiarise yourself with this package and its dependencies.
Fork the repository on GitHub and start implementing changes.
Write a test that plainly validates the changes made.
Build and test locally with
make local test
Submit a pull requests to get the changes merged.
Also be sure to review the Code of Conduct before submitting issues or pull requests.
Want to contribute financially? If you’ve found hookee
useful, sponsorship
would also be greatly appreciated!