Forem: James

I compared the top 5 webhook debugging tools so you don't have to (here's what I found)

James — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 02:21:43 +0000

Originally published on Hooklog — webhook debugging for developers.

I spent a weekend building a webhook debugger and lost sleep over a silent Stripe failure

James — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 10:07:31 +0000

Here is the thing nobody tells you about Stripe webhooks: they look simple until they are not.

It was a Friday night. I had just shipped a new feature. Everything worked in development. In production? Silent failure. The payment succeeded, but my database never updated. No error. No warning. Just... nothing.

Three hours of debugging later, I found the problem: my webhook handler was crashing on a malformed payload edge case, Stripe was retrying silently, and by the time I checked, the original event had long expired from the retry queue.

Sound familiar? It turns out this is the most common webhook problem developers face.

What I Built

I stopped that night and built Hooklog — a webhook proxy that gives you full visibility into what is actually hitting your endpoints.

With Hooklog:

Live payload inspection — see every webhook as it arrives, headers and body
Failure alerting — get emailed the moment a webhook returns 4xx or 5xx
Replay — re-send any captured webhook to debug your fix
No signup required — just create an endpoint and start sending webhooks

It takes 30 seconds to get a URL and start debugging.

Why I Built It

The existing tools (ngrok, Webhook.site, RequestBin) give you URL capture but miss the failure mode that costs developers the most: the silent failure. The webhook that arrives, your server processes it wrong, returns 500, Stripe retries twice, gives up, and you never know it happened until a customer emails you three days later asking why their account was not updated.

Hooklog is built specifically for this. It monitors your endpoint response codes and emails you on failure — so you know in minutes, not days.

The Stack

Built with Next.js, Express, and PostgreSQL. Dockerized, deployed to production over the weekend. Not a complex product — just a focused tool that solves one specific pain.

If you have ever lost an evening to webhook debugging, you know exactly what I mean. Try Hooklog free — no signup required, 10k events/month on the free tier.

Would love feedback from developers who have dealt with this firsthand.

The 3 Webhook Debugging Patterns That Would've Saved Me 3 Hours Last Week

James — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 05:02:44 +0000

Dev.to Article 3: "The 3 Webhook Debugging Patterns That Would've Saved Me 3 Hours Last Week"

Test article from API

James — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 01:08:08 +0000

Test body

The Webhook Failure Modes Nobody Warns You About

James — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 21:09:39 +0000

The Webhook Failure Modes Nobody Warns You About

Until you're staring at a 78-hour Stripe retry schedule wondering why your handler never fired.

Webhook integrations look simple. You point Stripe at your endpoint, you get a 200 OK, you're done.

Then something breaks in production — and you have no idea what. Was it the payload? The signature? Your server? Stripe's retry queue? Something downstream?

This isn't a guide to building webhook endpoints. It's a field guide to the failures developers actually hit — and how to debug them faster.

Failure Mode 1: The Silent Drop

Your endpoint returns 200 OK to Stripe. But your handler never fires.

What actually happened: your server accepted the request, but the payload was routed to a different part of your application that silently failed. Or the event was filtered by a middleware. Or the webhook was received but the database write failed and the error was swallowed.

The classic debug move: pepper your handler with console.log(). Deploy. Wait for Stripe to retry (up to 78 hours). Check logs. Repeat.

Faster way: capture the raw webhook before it reaches your server. See exactly what was sent, what your endpoint returned, and when — without touching your application code.

Failure Mode 2: The Empty Payload

Stripe says it sent the event. Your handler receives it. But event.data.object is null or {}.

This is almost always an API version mismatch — your endpoint is using a different Stripe API version than the one that generated the event. Stripe doesn't warn you; it just sends what it has.

The catch: you can't see the raw payload your endpoint received. You only see what your code parsed. And if the parsing failed silently, the debug path starts from the wrong place.

Fix: log the raw request body at the very top of your handler, before any parsing, before any middleware.

Failure Mode 3: The Signature Validation Loop

You're validating the Stripe signature. It keeps failing. You regenerate your webhook secret. It still fails. You hardcode the raw payload to test — it works.

The issue is almost always that you're validating the parsed body instead of the raw body. Stripe's signature is computed over the raw request body, not the JSON object your framework deserialized.

// Wrong — app.use(bodyParser.json()) already parsed this
app.post('/webhook', (req, res) => {
  const sig = req.headers['stripe-signature'];
  stripe.webhooks.constructEvent(req.body, sig, secret); // req.body is PARSED
});

// Right — use raw body
app.post('/webhook', express.raw({ type: 'application/json' }), (req, res) => {
  const sig = req.headers['stripe-signature'];
  stripe.webhooks.constructEvent(req.body, sig, secret); // req.body is RAW
});

If you've ever fought a Stripe signature validation error for an hour, you know this pain.

Failure Mode 4: The Infrastructure Block

Your endpoint is behind an ngrok tunnel that expired. Your firewall is blocking incoming requests from Stripe's IP range. Your server restarted and the process isn't back up yet.

Stripe reports delivery failures. Your server never received the event. Nobody knows why.

The problem: you have no visibility into whether your endpoint is actually reachable from the public internet. You find out something is wrong when Stripe emails you about failed deliveries.

Failure Mode 5: The Retry Wait

Your handler has a bug. You fix it. You need to test it.

Stripe's retry schedule: 1 hour, 12 hours, 72 hours. That's potentially 78 hours of waiting to verify your fix works.

For payment webhooks, Stripe will eventually retry — but waiting that long in development is brutal. The alternative is triggering test events manually through the Stripe CLI, which works but doesn't capture the full production scenario.

The Better Debug Workflow

The common thread in all these failures: you can't see what's actually happening.

A webhook debugging tool gives you a dedicated endpoint that sits between the sender (Stripe, GitHub, etc.) and your server:

Capture — the sender hits your debug endpoint instead of your server directly
Inspect — you see the full raw payload, headers, and timing in a dashboard
Replay — you resend the exact payload to your server instantly, without waiting for retries

This means you catch failures in seconds, not hours. You see what your server actually received — not what you hope it received.

Hooklog — Webhook Debugging Without the Wait

I built Hooklog to solve exactly this. It's free (10k events/month), requires no signup, and gives you:

A unique webhook URL you can point any service at immediately
Full payload inspection: headers, body, response, timing
One-click replay to test your handler without waiting for retries
Email alerts when your endpoint returns 4xx or 5xx

Get started: https://hooklog.c0c58bd.p.egbe.app

Free tier: 10,000 events/month, 3-day retention, up to 3 endpoints. No credit card required.

What's your worst webhook debugging story? Drop it in the comments — I read every one.

I Built a Webhook Debugger in a Weekend — Here's What I Learned

James — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 10:21:43 +0000

I Built a Webhook Debugger in a Weekend — Here's What I Learned

Hooklog lets you capture, inspect, and replay any webhook with a single URL. No more blind integrations.

The Problem

You're integrating Stripe webhooks into your Node.js app. You've read the docs, you think you've got it right — but nothing fires in production. Your local environment can't receive webhooks. You have no idea what's being sent, what's failing, or why.

You add console.log(). You deploy. You wait for Stripe to fire again (up to 78 hours, according to their retry schedule). Still nothing.

This isn't a niche problem. It's every developer integrating Stripe, GitHub, Slack, Twilio, or any service that uses webhooks.

The Old Solution

Most developers solve this one of two ways:

Ngrok + local server — great until you hit rate limits, need to share with a teammate, or forget to restart ngrok after a laptop sleep
Write temporary logging middleware — works once, then you delete it and lose the code

What nobody has is a Postman for webhooks: one URL that captures everything, shows you what's broken, and lets you replay it.

Building Hooklog

I built Hooklog in a weekend. Here's the architecture:

The Core Idea

Give every developer a unique webhook URL on sign-up (no sign-up required for the free tier):

https://hooklog.c0c58bd.p.egbe.app/webhook/sec_your_endpoint_id

Point any webhook at it. Hooklog captures:

Request headers
Request body (raw + parsed)
Response from your endpoint
Timing (time to first byte, total duration)
HTTP status code

Then you inspect it all in a dashboard.

The Stack

Frontend: Next.js 14 (App Router) + Tailwind CSS
Backend: Node.js + Express
Storage: JSONL files (MVP) — Postgres upgrade planned
Hosting: Docker on internal PaaS gateway
Payments: Stripe hosted checkout

The Tricky Parts

1. Next.js 14 Dynamic Routes

Next.js 14 changed how dynamic route params work — they're now Promises that must be awaited:

// Next.js 13
export async function GET(request: Request, { params }: { params: { id: string } }) {
  const { id } = params
}

// Next.js 14 — params is a Promise
export async function GET(request: Request, { params }: { params: Promise<{ id: string }> }) {
  const { id } = await params
}

2. File Storage + Directory Creation

import { promises as fs } from 'fs';
import path from 'path';

async function saveEvent(endpointId: string, event: WebhookEvent) {
  const dir = path.join(process.cwd(), 'data', 'events', endpointId);
  await fs.mkdir(dir, { recursive: true }); // Don't forget recursive!
  const file = path.join(dir, `${Date.now()}.jsonl`);
  await fs.writeFile(file, JSON.stringify(event));
}

3. Docker Multi-Stage Build

FROM node:20-slim AS builder
WORKDIR /app
COPY package*.json ./
RUN npm install && npm run build

FROM node:20-slim AS runner
WORKDIR /app
COPY --from=builder /app/.next/ ./.next/
COPY --from=builder /app/public/ ./public/
COPY --from=builder /app/node_modules/ ./node_modules/
EXPOSE 3000
CMD ["npm", "start"]

What Hooklog Does

1. Capture Every Webhook — point any webhook at your Hooklog URL and it captures everything.

2. Inspect in Real-Time — headers, body, response status, timing, timestamp.

3. Replay Without Waiting — click Replay and fire immediately instead of waiting for Stripe's retry schedule (1h, 12h, 72h).

4. Failure Alerts — email immediately when your endpoint returns 4xx/5xx.

The Numbers

Launched 2026-03-27. After 4 hours: 0 paying customers, 0 signups. Real Stripe test-mode webhooks are hitting it though.

What's Next

Adding analytics to understand where users drop off
Setting up proper authentication
Migrating from JSONL to Postgres
Google Ads to drive targeted traffic

Try it: https://hooklog.c0c58bd.p.egbe.app/

Free tier: 10,000 events/month, 3-day retention, 3 endpoints.

Have a webhook debugging horror story? Drop it in the comments.