Webhook Settings

Webhooks (or HTTP callbacks) can be used to notify your systems about events as they occur in your Chargebee instance. Using the Chargebee console, you can setup several webhook endpoints to be notified of such events.

Choosing the right event delivery mechanism: EventBridge over webhooks

If your business processes a large volume of Chargebee events or operates primarily within AWS, Amazon EventBridge is the recommended integration method. It provides a secure, scalable, and fault-tolerant event delivery system that eliminates the need to manage webhook infrastructure.

EventBridge integrates natively with AWS services such as Lambda, SQS, and Step Functions, enabling seamless event-driven workflows across your AWS environment. It ensures reliable event delivery even when your downstream systems experience downtime, with minimal operational overhead.

For setup instructions and configuration details, see Event Streaming via AWS EventBridge.

Configure Webhooks

To configure your webhooks, go to Settings > Configure Chargebee > API Keys and Webhooks. Then switch to the Webhooks tab.

If you have not added a webhook already, click Add Webhook.

Webhook Name and URL

The Webhook Name is the name by which the webhook will be referred to in Chargebee. The Webhook URL represents the endpoint to which the webhook should be sent.

Basic Authentication

It is recommended that your webhook URLs be protected using basic authentication and/or HTTPS.

To use basic authentication, toggle Protect webhook URL with basic authentication and fill in the Username and Password.

Tip: Another (less secure) way of authenticating a webhook call is by including a key generated by you, as part of the webhook URL. For example, the URL could look like: https://server.yourcompany.com/cb-webhook?key=<yourkey>

API Version

Chargebee supports multiple API versions. The event content sent to the webhook is structured based on the API version selected. Hence it is crucial that the API version of the webhook matches the API version of the client library used by your application server. Learn more about API versioning here.

Events to Send

You can use this dropdown menu to select the Chargebee events that should be sent via this webhook. All Events are selected by default. However, select just the intended set of events in this list to enable your systems can handle the volume of webhooks triggered.

Set this as primary

The statuses of all webhooks for an event are available in the array attribute webhook inside the event resource.

When you define a webhook as primary, its status is supplied in the webhook_status attribute of the events resource. This is to ensure backward compatibility with an earlier API where only one webhook was configurable for a site.

Exclude card information

You also have the option to exclude card object from the webhook call. Enabling this will remove the masked card details object from the webhook call.

Test Webhooks

You can test a webhook once it is created.

1. Click on Test Webhook on the card for the webhook.
2. Choose an event to test with.
3. Click Test URL. The request sent, the status of the response received and the response itself is displayed.

Best Practices for Using Webhooks

To ensure the reliability, security, and maintainability of your webhook integrations, follow these best practices:

Manage Webhooks

You can manage your webhooks using the More Options menu on the webhook card. The available actions are:

• Update: Modify the webhook's configuration to reflect changes in your requirements.
• Deactivate: Temporarily disable the webhook on your site without deleting it. This is helpful if you need to pause notifications but want to retain the webhook's configuration. Note: On a test site, if a webhook is not used, you will receive an email notification prompting you to deactivate it. If no action is taken, the webhook will be automatically deactivated.
• Delete: Permanently remove the webhook from your Chargebee site.

Webhook Timeouts

There are 3 timeouts for Webhooks in Chargebee:

1. Connection Timeout: The connection timeout is the timeout for making the initial connection to the webhook URL's HTTP server.

2. Read Timeout: Once the initial connection has been made, at any time there is a possibility that there is an indefinite wait to read data from the HTTP server. The read timeout is the timeout for such a wait.

3. Total Webhook Timeout: In addition to the above timeouts, Chargebee also checks the total execution of time of any webhook call via the webhook execution timeout.

The values for each timeout are as follows:

Automatic Retries

Webhook execution can fail due to timeouts or errors. For each event whose webhook call fails, the calls are retried up to 7 times based on the following schedules:

Duplicate Handling

Due to webhook retries, it's possible that your application receives the same webhook more than once. Ensure idempotency of the webhook call by detecting such duplicates within your application. This can be done by examining the id parameter since its value is unique to an event and thus identifies it.

Out-of-Order Delivery

Webhooks can also arrive at your application out-of-order. This can be due to issues such as network delays or webhook failures. However, you can determine the order of the events by examining the resource_version attribute of the resource sent by the webhook. resource_version is incremented once for every change made to the resource.

FAQ

1) What IP addresses does Chargebee send webhooks from that I should allow-list?

See this section in our developer documentation to know which IP addresses our webhooks are delivered from.