Webhooks for when you don't really want to expose port 80...

June 8, 2021 7:11 AM

We have started using Tawk and it's great. It has a webhook option to let you know if you've got waiting messages etc.

Is there a way I can (safely) receive these webhooks on my happily NAT'd and firewalled LAN? I don't want to expose port 80 etc. I wondered if there was some service I could sign up to that would act as a relay? Thanks

posted by dance to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Don't know anything about Tawk, but maybe Zapier or n8n.io?
posted by pompomtom at 7:33 AM on June 8, 2021

https://ngrok.com/ may work for what you need. I've used it for temporary local webhook debugging before but I'm pretty you can make a persistent setup too.
posted by reptile at 7:43 AM on June 8, 2021

If you don't want to use ngrok (or roll your own of a similar type thing), you could potentially open it up temporarily, send a few events through, and then see what IPs Tawk connects from and lock the port forward down to those IPs. (Or maybe contact their support or something - this won't be the first time someone's wanted to do this kind of thing.)

In addition to ngrok, there's also Expose - I found this in the Laravel docs; its Valet thing it has for local development stuff can work with either ngrok or Expose to.. well, expose your app to the general Internet for testing. Expose isn't a Laravel (or even PHP) specific thing - it can expose anything that talks HTTP or HTTPS on your machine - so you might also find it useful regardless of what your app is written in.
posted by mrg at 12:26 PM on June 8, 2021