HTTPS webhook delivery

Requirements

• You're familiar with how webhooks work.

• You're familiar with the webhooks best practices.

• You're authenticated with the GraphQL Admin API or REST Admin API.

• You're a Shopify Partner.

• You've created a development store for testing webhooks.

Step 1: Register an endpoint

Your endpoint must be an HTTPS webhook address with a valid SSL certificate that can correctly process event notifications.

Payloads contain a JSON or XML object with the data for the webhook event. The contents and structure of each payload varies by the subscribed topic. Refer to the REST Webhook resource or the GraphQL WebhookSubscription object for more information.

Step 2: Subscribe to a webhook topic

Subscribe to a webhook topic by doing one of the following:

• Running the webhookSubscriptionCreate mutation in GraphQL

• Sending a POST request to the Webhook resource in REST

For example, the following requests subscribe an app to the orders/create webhook topic.

Step 3: Test the webhook

1. Run a local server or use a publicly-available service such as Beeceptor.

2. If you're running a local server, then make it publicly available using a service like Pagekite or ngrok.

Step 4: Receive the webhook

After you register an endpoint, Shopify sends an HTTP POST request to the URL specified every time that event occurs. The HTTP POST request's parameters contain the JSON or XML data relevant to the event that triggered the request.

Shopify verifies SSL certificates when delivering payloads to HTTPS webhook addresses. Make sure your server is correctly configured to support HTTPS with a valid SSL certificate.

Step 5: Verify the webhook

Before you respond to a webhook, you need to verify that the webhook was sent from Shopify. You can verify the webhook by calculating a digital signature.

Each webhook request includes a base64-encoded X-Shopify-Hmac-SHA256 header, which is generated using the app's shared secret along with the data sent in the request. If you're using PHP, or a Rack-based framework such as Ruby on Rails or Sinatra, then the header is HTTP_X_SHOPIFY_HMAC_SHA256.

1. Compute the HMAC digest according to the following algorithm:

2. Compare the computed value to the value in the X-Shopify-Hmac-SHA256 or HTTP_X_SHOPIFY_HMAC_SHA256 header.

   If the HMAC digest and header value match, then the webhook was sent from Shopify.

Step 6: Respond to the webhook

Your webhook acknowledges that it received data by sending a 200 OK response. Any response outside of the 200 range, including 3XX HTTP redirection codes, indicates that you didn't receive the webhook.

Shopify doesn't follow redirects for webhook notifications and considers them to be an error response.

Retry frequency

Shopify has implemented a five-second timeout period and a retry period for webhook subscriptions.

Shopify waits five seconds for a response to each request to a webhook. If there's no response, or an error is returned, then Shopify retries the connection 19 times over the next 48 hours. If there are 19 consecutive failures, then the webhook subscription is automatically deleted. A warning that the subscription will be deleted is sent to the app's emergency developer email address.

To avoid timeouts and errors, consider deferring app processing until after the webhook response has been successfully sent.

Next steps

• Set up the mandatory webhooks for public apps.

• Learn how to manage webhooks for different API versions.