Standing up a Temporary Webhook using xURL

Note: This section assumes you have the xurl CLI tool set up. If you haven't installed and configured xurl yet, check out the xURL section first.

If you're looking for a quick and easy way to stand up a webhook to use with the X API, the xURL tool offers this functionality.

The xURL webhook abstracts away the need to write your own handlers for the GET and POST requests that X sends to your server. If you're looking for that logic to incorporate into your production app, check out the next section where we write a Python Flask app.

Quick Start

Prerequisites

What you'll need:

The xURL CLI tool (already installed and configured)
A free (or higher) account with ngrok.com
Your ngrok auth token

Setup Steps

1. Register Your OAuth1 Keys

First, ensure your OAuth1 keys are registered with xurl:

xurl auth oauth1

You'll need to provide your consumer key and secret, and access key and secret. Generate these from the X Developer Portal.

2. Start the Webhook Server

Run the xURL webhook command:

xurl webhook start

You'll be prompted for your ngrok auth token so that xURL can create a temporary HTTPS endpoint:

Starting webhook server with ngrok...
Enter your ngrok authtoken (leave empty to try NGROK_AUTHTOKEN env var):

Once you've entered your auth token, your endpoint will be generated and you'll see output like this:

Configuring ngrok to forward to local port: 8080
Ngrok tunnel established!
  Forwarding URL: https://d1cb5181df5c.ngrok.app -> localhost:8080
Use this URL for your X API webhook registration: https://d1cb5181df5c.ngrok.app/webhook
Starting local HTTP server to handle requests from ngrok tunnel (forwarded from https://d1cb5181df5c.ngrok.app)...

Using Your Webhook

Leave the terminal window running - any webhook events, including the security check, will be displayed in that window.

To stop the webhook server: Press Ctrl+C in the terminal.

You can now use the generated URL (ending in /webhook) to register a webhook with the X API. See the next section for a tutorial on webhook registration.

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