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zulip/templates/zerver/api/outgoing-webhooks.md

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Outgoing webhooks

Outgoing webhooks allow you to build or set up Zulip integrations which are notified when certain types of messages are sent in Zulip. When one of those events is triggered, we'll send a HTTP POST payload to the webhook's configured URL. Webhooks can be used to power a wide range of Zulip integrations. For example, the Zulip Botserver is built on top of this API.

Zulip supports outgoing webhooks both in a clean native Zulip format, as well as a format that's compatible with Slack's outgoing webhook API, which can help with porting an existing Slack integration to work with Zulip.

To register an outgoing webhook:

  • Log in to the Zulip server.
  • Navigate to Personal settings () -> Bots -> Add a new bot. Select Outgoing webhook for bot type, the URL you'd like Zulip to post to as the Endpoint URL, the format you want, and click on Create bot. to submit the form/
  • Your new bot user will appear in the Active bots panel, which you can use to edit the bot's settings.

Triggering

There are currently two ways to trigger an outgoing webhook:

  1. @-mention the bot user in a stream. If the bot replies, its reply will be sent to that stream and topic.
  2. Send a private message with the bot as one of the recipients. If the bot replies, its reply will be sent to that thread.

Timeouts

The remote server must respond to a POST request in a timely manner. The default timeout for outgoing webhooks is 10 seconds, though this can be configured by the administrator of the Zulip server by setting OUTGOING_WEBHOOKS_TIMEOUT_SECONDS in the server's settings.

Outgoing webhook format

{generate_code_example|/zulip-outgoing-webhook:post|fixture(200)}

Fields documentation

{generate_return_values_table|zulip.yaml|/zulip-outgoing-webhook:post}

Replying with a message

Many bots implemented using this outgoing webhook API will want to send a reply message into Zulip. Zulip's outgoing webhook API provides a convenient way to do that by simply returning an appropriate HTTP response to the Zulip server.

A correctly implemented bot will return a JSON object containing one of two possible formats, described below.

Example response payloads

If the bot code wants to opt out of responding, it can explicitly encode a JSON dictionary that contains response_not_required set to True, so that no response message is sent to the user. (This is helpful to distinguish deliberate non-responses from bugs.)

Here's an example of the JSON your server should respond with if you would not like to send a response message:

{
    "response_not_required": true
}

Here's an example of the JSON your server should respond with if you would like to send a response message:

{
    "content": "Hey, we just received **something** from Zulip!"
}

The content field should contain Zulip-format Markdown.

Note that an outgoing webhook bot can use the Zulip REST API with its API key in case your bot needs to do something else, like add an emoji reaction or upload a file.

Slack-format webhook format

This interface translates Zulip's outgoing webhook's request into the format that Slack's outgoing webhook interface sends. As a result, one should be able to use this to interact with third-party integrations designed to work with Slack's outgoing webhook interface. Here's how we fill in the fields that a Slack-format webhook expects:

Name Description
token A string of alphanumeric characters you can use to authenticate the webhook request (each bot user uses a fixed token)
team_id String ID of the Zulip organization
team_domain Domain of the Zulip organization
channel_id Stream ID
channel_name Stream name
timestamp Timestamp for when message was sent
user_id ID of the user who sent the message
user_name Full name of sender
text The content of the message (in Markdown)
trigger_word Trigger method
service_id ID of the bot user

The above data is posted as list of tuples (not JSON), here's an example:

[('token', 'v9fpCdldZIej2bco3uoUvGp06PowKFOf'),
 ('team_id', 'zulip'),
 ('team_domain', 'zulip.com'),
 ('channel_id', '123'),
 ('channel_name', 'integrations'),
 ('timestamp', 1532078950),
 ('user_id', 21),
 ('user_name', 'Sample User'),
 ('text', '@**test**'),
 ('trigger_word', 'mention'),
 ('service_id', 27)]
  • For successful request, if data is returned, it returns that data, else it returns a blank response.
  • For failed request, it returns the reason of failure, as returned by the server, or the exception message.