I am Confused About Webhooks Setup & want Advice

Question and Answers
1

Hey everyone,

I have been tinkering with the Nylas developer dashboard for a side project I am building & while most of it has been smooth sailing, I hit a bit of a wall with setting up webhooks. I followed the official docs Also i have double-checked my callback URLs & even tested them with ngrok – still no luck receiving events. :confused:

I am using Node.js on the backend & React for the frontend. I want to know if there is some tiny step I am missing or a gotcha in the dashboard settings that’s easy to overlook?

Also if anyone here has suggestions on where to brush up frontend integration techniques, I came across a reactjs course online that seemed helpful for handling API stuff on the frontend.

Anyway, if someone could drop some insight it would be grateful.

Thank you

2

I found the issue with your webhook setup - Nylas webhooks are not compatible with Ngrok because of throughput limiting concerns. This explains why your Ngrok testing isn’t working.
For webhook testing, Nylas recommends using Visual Studio Code port forwarding, Hookdeck, or a similar webhook tool instead.

Here are the key webhook setup requirements you might be missing:

Webhook Verification Requirements

Your webhook endpoint must respond to Nylas’ verification request within 10 seconds. When creating a webhook, Nylas sends a GET request with a challenge query parameter, and your application must return the exact value of the challenge parameter in the response body.

Essential Setup Steps

  1. HTTPS endpoint: Your webhook URL must direct to an HTTPS endpoint accessible from the public internet
  2. Correct scopes: Ensure you have the correct authentication scopes for your webhook subscriptions
  3. 200 response: Your application must respond with a 200 status code to prevent Nylas marking the webhook as failing or failed

Creating Webhooks with Node.js SDK

Here’s the exact code for creating a webhook:

javascript
import 'dotenv/config'
import Nylas from "nylas"

const NylasConfig = {
  apiKey: process.env.NYLAS_API_KEY,
  apiUri: process.env.NYLAS_API_URI,
}

const nylas = new Nylas(NylasConfig)

const createWebhook = async () => {
  try {
    const webhook = await nylas.webhooks.create({
      requestBody: {
        triggerTypes: [WebhookTriggers.EventCreated],
        webhookUrl: process.env.WEBHOOK_URL,
        description: "My first webhook",
        notificationEmailAddress: process.env.EMAIL,
      }
    })

    console.log("Webhook created:", webhook)
  } catch (error) {
    console.error("Error creating webhook:", error)
  }
}

createWebhook()

Testing Your Webhook

Use the Send Test Event endpoint to verify your webhook destination is configured correctly. This sends a test payload and listens for success acknowledgement.

Switch from Ngrok to VS Code port forwarding or Hookdeck, ensure your endpoint returns the challenge parameter correctly, and verify you have proper HTTPS setup - this should resolve your webhook issues.

We also have this video that one of our developers put together, which might help!

3

webhooks.site or hookdeck is a better alternative than ngrok to test your webhooks. You can setup challenge and all in those websites.

4

Maybe they’re better, maybe they’re not. But either way, why wouldn’t you let customers make that decision for themselves instead of blocking the most industry standard tool?

5

Thanks for raising this – and honestly, your frustration is understandable. ngrok is absolutely a mainstream and widely adopted developer tool, and we recognize many teams already use it heavily across their workflows for webhook testing, mobile development, and local integration work.

To clarify one important point up front: the restriction is not because ngrok is incapable of handling Nylas webhook verification/challenge flows. It technically can. A developer can implement the required challenge response in their local application behind the ngrok tunnel and successfully complete webhook setup.

The decision was instead driven by operational and reliability concerns we encountered historically with ephemeral/local webhook receivers.

In practice, we repeatedly saw scenarios where:

  • a laptop was closed or went to sleep

  • a local dev server crashed or restarted

  • an ngrok session expired or changed URLs

  • a temporary testing endpoint was accidentally left configured longer-term

When that happens, webhook deliveries begin failing and retrying continuously against an unavailable endpoint. At scale, this creates unnecessary retry amplification, queue backpressure, operational noise, and support burden.

One challenge for us is that Nylas is intentionally very open and flexible in how customers use environments and webhook endpoints. We generally cannot reliably determine whether a given endpoint is:

  • “just local testing”

  • a shared staging environment

  • a long-lived internal integration

  • or something business-critical that accidentally evolved into production usage

Even endpoints configured in “dev” or “staging” environments sometimes become semi-permanent integration points in real customer workflows.

That is why we historically chose to only allow webhook receivers that are designed to remain durably available.

Tools like Hookdeck, Pipedream, and Webhook.site differ from ngrok in an important way:

  • they are hosted receivers rather than transient tunnels to a local machine

  • they can remain available even when a developer’s laptop is offline

  • several also support challenge/verification responses natively within the platform itself

So the recommendation is less about “ngrok bad” and more about preferring durable webhook ingestion platforms that reduce operational failure modes for both customers and Nylas.

That said, we absolutely understand the developer ergonomics argument, and the feedback here is fair. We’ll make sure the team sees it – especially the point that the current restriction can feel surprising when ngrok is so commonly documented and supported elsewhere in the ecosystem.

6

Thanks, that’s helpful to understand more of where you guys are coming from. Given that you have to choose an environment when you create a new Nylas app, it does seem like you should be able to safely categorize apps and give different support and stability SLAs for development vs production, but I understand in the real world these things can get messy.

Is cloudflared durable? That seems to be implicitly recommended in the docs since a) that’s what the nylas CLI uses and b) the cloudflare URLs aren’t blocked. But from my understanding if I do cloudflared tunnel --url ``http://localhost:8000/, it’s more similar to ngrok than to Hookdeck or webhook.site.

7

Yes, cloudflared is a great option - 3 of our lead engineers just recommended it to me, and it is the default option in our CLI (below).

Also, there have been times when ngrok has blocked Nylas customers due to extreme high volume of webhooks.

Hope this helps!