Webhooks Intro

Feed Control's webhooks are for developers who want their applications to process new feed items as they're detected by Feed Control.

Instead of polling feeds and checking for new items in your application, you can set up a webhook handler to receive new feed items as soon as they're processed by Feed Control. Webhooks are also great for serverless setups.

Webhook request format

Webhooks are sent as HTTP POST requests to to your webhook URL. The POST requests will have a content-type of application/json.

Here's an example of what Feed Control will send to your webhook handler:

Webhook response handling

Your server should respond within 15 seconds with a HTTP 200 status code to indicate success. Anything else (including no response within 15 seconds) will be treated as a failure and queued for further attempts. Feed Control will retry failed webhook requests every 30 minutes. If a request fails 10 times, it will not be retried.

Webhook data

Feed Control sends the following information in the JSON object of its webhooks:

Item keys	Description
id	Feed item ID in the Feed Control database. Each item will have a unique item ID.
created_at	The date and time (UTC) that Feed Control detected and added the item to its database.
title	Item title
author	The author field value in the source feed
date	The date and time associated with the feed item (if present in the source feed)
url	Item URL
guid	Item GUID found in the source feed, or one generated based on item URL or title.
content	Original item content (possibly HTML).
content_clean_html	Based on content above. Feed Control's stripped-down, sanitized version that can be displayed in web apps.
content_plain_text	A plain text version of the content.
feed	JSON object representing the feed the item belongs to (see below).
Feed keys	Description
id	Feed ID in the Feed Control database. If you enable webhooks for multiple feeds, you can use this to determine the feed.
created_at	Date and time the feed was added to Feed Control.
updated_at	Date and time the feed was last edited in Feed Control.
name	The name you have given the feed (e.g. 'ABC Feed mentioning XYZ').
title	The original or edited feed title (if you enable RSS/JSON generation, this will be used in the output as the feed title).
url	The source feed URL.
feed_fetched_at	Date and time the source feed was last checked for new items.
update_frequency	How frequently the feed is checked for new items, in minutes. A value of 60 means the feed is checked every hour.
description	The original or edited feed description (if you enable RSS/JSON generation, this will be used in the output as the feed description).
generated_rss_url	If RSS generation has been enabled for the feed, the URL where you can access the generated RSS. Null otherwise.
generated_json_url	If JSON generation has been enabled for the feed, the URL where you can access the generated JSON. Null otherwise.

Each item will contain three versions of the content: original ('content'); safe to display, stripped-down version ('content_clean_html'); plain text ('content_plain_text'). If the full article content is not included in the original feed, enable 'fetch full text' when adding a feed and Feed Control will attempt to retrieve the full content and send it along.

Note on generated RSS/JSON files: If you've enabled these, you may receive the webhook before Feed Control has been able to update these. So if you pull in the RSS/JSON in your handler, it might not yet contain the item you're processing.

RSS to Google Sheets

To see how to use Feed Control's webhooks feature to automatically store new feed items in Google Sheets, please see our blog post: RSS feed to Google Sheets.