Infrastructure
AWS SNS Webhooks
Amazon Simple Notification Service. Receive events from any AWS service via SNS topic subscriptions.
Connecting AWS SNS to Hookbase
Create a source in Hookbase first — it gives you an ingest URL to paste into AWS SNS. Then:
- 1Go to AWS Console → SNS → Topics → Your Topic
- 2Click "Create subscription" with Protocol set to HTTPS
- 3Paste your Hookbase ingest URL as the Endpoint
- 4SNS will send a SubscriptionConfirmation — confirm via the SubscribeURL
- 5Once confirmed, notifications will flow to your Hookbase source
Signature verification
AWS SNS signs its webhooks with SHA256withRSA (certificate-based) in x-amz-sns-message-type, and Hookbase has no verifier for that combination today. We would rather say so here than let a source report every event as verified while nothing was checked.
What you can do:
- Receive them on a
customsource with no signing secret. Hookbase still dedupes, retries, transforms, routes and replays them; it just does not vouch for the sender. - Set a signing secret anyway if AWS SNS can be configured to send a hex HMAC-SHA256 of the raw body in
X-Signature,X-Webhook-SignatureorX-Hub-Signature-256— that is the one scheme the custom verifier implements. - Verify downstream: the original headers travel with the event, so your own service or a transform can check the signature itself. The key is at SNS messages are signed with an AWS certificate. Verify using the SigningCertURL in the message body..
- Narrow the blast radius with an IP allowlist and a hard-to-guess source slug.
AWS SNS event types
3 of the events people route most often. Hookbase accepts every event AWS SNS sends, whether or not it is listed here.
Notification
A standard notification message
SubscriptionConfirmation
A subscription confirmation request
UnsubscribeConfirmation
An unsubscribe confirmation
What a AWS SNS webhook looks like
A Notification payload. Hookbase stores the raw body exactly as it arrived, so this is also what you get back on a replay.
{
"Type": "Notification",
"MessageId": "22b80b92-fdea-4c2c-8f9d-bdfb0c7bf324",
"TopicArn": "arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:123456789012:MyTopic",
"Subject": "S3 Event Notification",
"Message": "{\"Records\":[{\"eventSource\":\"aws:s3\",\"eventName\":\"ObjectCreated:Put\",\"s3\":{\"bucket\":{\"name\":\"my-bucket\"},\"object\":{\"key\":\"uploads/file.pdf\"}}}]}",
"Timestamp": "2024-01-15T10:30:00.000Z",
"SignatureVersion": "2"
}Start receiving AWS SNS webhooks
Create a source, paste the URL into AWS SNS, and watch the first event arrive. The free tier includes 1,000 events a month.
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