Webhook Delivery Simulator
Send a webhook through a production-style delivery flow. Change endpoint responses, watch retries and backoff, inspect real HMAC-SHA256 signatures, and redeliver the same message to see receiver-side deduplication.
Category: DevOps
What You Will Learn
- Why a webhook delivery is a durable state machine rather than a single HTTP POST
- How exponential backoff spreads eight retry attempts across roughly 27 hours
- Which HTTP responses are worth retrying and which should be dropped immediately
- Why a timeout is the ambiguous case that makes idempotency mandatory
- How HMAC-SHA256 webhook signatures are built over the id, timestamp and raw body
- Why verifying a re-serialized JSON body always fails, and what to do instead
- How a timestamp tolerance window limits replay attacks
- How receivers deduplicate deliveries using a message ID that is stable across retries
Topics covered: webhooks, http, retries, idempotency, hmac, signatures, api, reliability, educational, interactive
// simulator
Webhook Delivery Simulator
Send a webhook through a production-style delivery flow. Change endpoint responses, watch retries and backoff, inspect real HMAC-SHA256 signatures, and redeliver the same message to see receiver-side deduplication.
Delivery path
Follow one message from your app to the receiver.
invoice.paid
Durable message
ID + time + body
Intermittent
Waiting for a delivery
Retry schedule
Start with Intermittent to watch two failures recover on the third attempt.
Put this delivery path into production
Svix Dispatch provides the durable queue, automatic retries, signed requests, rate limits, searchable attempt logs, replay, and a customer-facing endpoint portal behind one API.
About this webhook delivery simulator
1. Persist and retry
A delivery must survive a restart. Retry timeouts, 429s, and server errors with backoff; drop malformed requests that another attempt cannot fix.
2. Verify raw bytes
The signature covers the message ID, timestamp, and raw body. Verify before parsing so whitespace or serialization changes cannot invalidate an authentic request.
3. Deduplicate
Delivery is at-least-once. Store the stable message ID with the business update in one transaction, then return 200 when the same message arrives again.
From simulator to production
The production webhook delivery guide turns this flow into a typed sender and receiver you can build from. This simulator uses the published Svix Dispatch retry schedule and genuine Standard Webhooks signatures. Dispatch adds the durable queue, endpoint controls, attempt history, replay, and customer portal that turn these mechanics into a complete delivery product. For the underlying queue and throttling concepts, try the message queue simulator and rate limit simulator.
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