Why Does My Webhook Work in Testing but Fail in Production?

Below is a list of areas worth investigating:

1. Webhook Tunnel Consideration

• Definition: A webhook tunnel typically acts as a proxy or forwarding mechanism, allowing external services to reach your webhook endpoint if it's behind NAT or a firewall.
• Impact: If your production environment requires such a tunnel for inbound connections and it isn’t configured, the webhook might not be receiving the POST requests even though your testing environment (likely running locally or differently) bypasses this limitation.

2. Environment Differences

• Network & Firewall Settings: Production servers often have stricter firewall rules. Check if outbound/inbound traffic on the required port is open.
• SSL/TLS Requirements: Verify that the production endpoint is using the correct certificates. Some webhook providers require HTTPS.
• Endpoint Accessibility: Ensure that the production URL is publicly accessible if the webhook provider is external.

3. Debugging Steps

• Logs: Check both your application’s logs and any logs from intermediary devices (firewalls, load balancers, etc.) for clues.
• Test with Tools: Use tools like cURL or Postman from an external network to simulate the webhook POST request to your production URL.
• Compare Configurations: Compare settings between testing and production environments to identify differences that could affect connectivity.

Conclusion

Defining the webhook tunnel might be necessary if your production environment’s networking requires it. However, if other elements in your environment (firewalls, SSL settings, endpoint access rules) differ from your test environment, they might also be causing the issue.

Further investigation into the production network setup and infrastructure configuration is recommended.