Webhooks reference

May 22, 2020

Jan Cerman

Webhooks provide an event-based notification mechanism. They let you know about specific changes in your project as they happen. Learn how they work in Kontent.

Events to trigger a webhook

When you create a webhook, you can define specific events that trigger the webhook. These events are usually the result of specific user actions in the Kontent UI. They can be also caused by altering your project via the Management API.

The events are divided in three sections based on the type and purpose of the notifications they trigger. For example, if you need to rebuild your static site for preview purposes, you'll want to use the events under Preview Delivery API triggers. Or if you need to send content for translation after it's been moved to the review step, you'll want to use the events under Management API triggers.

Choose events based on your use case and the API you need to use after receiving the notification. Your project's content is synchronized across Management API, Delivery API, and Delivery Preview API. This is why some of the events may seem as duplicates.

Management API triggers

These events let you subscribe to specific changes to your content in the Management API.

Workflow step events – triggered when a content item is moved to a specific workflow step.
Content item events – triggered when a content item is created, deleted, or restored after being deleted, based on your selection.

Delivery API triggers

These events let you subscribe to specific changes to your content in the Delivery API. This API contains only published content.

Content item events – triggered when a content item is published or unpublished, based on your selection.
Taxonomy events – triggered when a taxonomy group is created (or updated), deleted, or restored after being deleted, based on your selection.

Publish event vs. Published step event

When you publish content items, first their workflow step changes to Published and then they become publicly available through the Delivery API. These are two separate events – first is the workflow step transition to the Published step event followed by the content item Publish event for the Delivery API. You can subscribe to both events if needed.

Delivery Preview API triggers

These events let you subscribe to specific changes to your content in the Delivery Preview API. This API contains published and unpublished content.

Content item events – triggered when a content item is created or updated, or deleted, based on your selection.
Taxonomy events – triggered when a taxonomy group is created or updated, deleted, or restored after being deleted, based on your selection.

Anatomy of webhook notifications

Kontent sends notifications to your webhook URL as POST requests. Every POST request contains a JSON payload and a set of HTTP headers. The JSON payload consists of the Data object with metadata of the changed content and the Message object with details about the origin of the notification.

For example, here's a webhook notification sent as a result of the content item Publish event for the Delivery API.

JSON
{
  "data": {
    "items": [
      {
        "id": "e5d575fe-9608-4523-a07d-e32d780bf92a",
        "codename": "published_article",
        "language": "en-US",
        "type": "article"
      }
    ],
    "taxonomies": []
  },
  "message": {
    "id": "e1b372a2-1186-4929-b370-904c59f060b7",
    "project_id": "bf32e7ab-85c3-0073-47b9-90838a8462de",
    "type": "content_item_variant",
    "operation": "publish",
    "api_name": "delivery_production",
    "created_timestamp": "2020-05-18T10:52:33.1059256Z",
    "webhook_url": "https://example.com/cache-invalidate"
  }
}
{
  "data": {
    "items": [
      {
        "id": "e5d575fe-9608-4523-a07d-e32d780bf92a",
        "codename": "published_article",
        "language": "en-US",
        "type": "article"
      }
    ],
    "taxonomies": []
  },
  "message": {
    "id": "e1b372a2-1186-4929-b370-904c59f060b7",
    "project_id": "bf32e7ab-85c3-0073-47b9-90838a8462de",
    "type": "content_item_variant",
    "operation": "publish",
    "api_name": "delivery_production",
    "created_timestamp": "2020-05-18T10:52:33.1059256Z",
    "webhook_url": "https://example.com/cache-invalidate"
  }
}

Data object

The Data object contains metadata of the changed content. For example, consider a change of taxonomy group that's used in multiple published content items. Notification about such change will contain metadata of the changed taxonomy group as well as all the affected content items.

JSON
{
  "data": {
    "items": [
      {
        "id": "e113e464-bffb-4fbd-a29b-47991d003732",
        "codename": "report_for_2019",
        "language": "en-US",
        "type": "article"
      },
      {
        "id": "e113e464-bffb-4fbd-a29b-47991d003732",
        "codename": "report_for_2020",
        "language": "en-US",
        "type": "article"
      }
    ],
    "taxonomies": [
      {
        "id": "4794dde6-f700-4a5d-b0dc-9ae16dcfc73d",
        "codename": "category"
      }
    ]
  },
  "message": { ... }
}
{
  "data": {
    "items": [
      {
        "id": "e113e464-bffb-4fbd-a29b-47991d003732",
        "codename": "report_for_2019",
        "language": "en-US",
        "type": "article"
      },
      {
        "id": "e113e464-bffb-4fbd-a29b-47991d003732",
        "codename": "report_for_2020",
        "language": "en-US",
        "type": "article"
      }
    ],
    "taxonomies": [
      {
        "id": "4794dde6-f700-4a5d-b0dc-9ae16dcfc73d",
        "codename": "category"
      }
    ]
  },
  "message": { ... }
}

Item objects

Due to the variety of events you can subscribe to, the items array in the Data object may contain different types of Item objects. The type of the Item objects is never mixed within a single notification.

About the first item in the items array

When the notification's type is content_item_variant and its operation is archive, restore, publish, or unpublish, then the first item in the items array designates the content item that caused the notification to be sent. For example, if the operation is unpublish, then the first item in the array was unpublished and the other items were affected by this operation.

Item object for content item events

id (string): The content item's internal ID.
codename (string): The content item's codename.
language (string): The language's codename.
type (string): The content type's codename.

Item object for workflow events

item (Reference to content item): The content item's ID.
language (Reference to language): The language's ID.
transition_from (Reference to workflow step): The ID of the workflow step the content item was moved from.
transition_to (Reference to workflow step): The ID of the workflow step the content item was moved to.

Taxonomy object

The taxonomies array in the Data object always contains a single type of object that specifies a taxonomy group.

id (string): The taxonomy group's internal ID.
codename (string): The taxonomy group's codename.

The taxonomies array is not present for notifications about workflow step transitions.

Message object

The Message object tells you the origin of the notification. For example, you can see which project the notification came from and what action caused it to be sent.

id (string): The notification's internal ID.
type (string): The type of the changed data. For more details, see Types and operations.
operation (string): The operation (such as create, upsert, archive, and others) performed on the data. For more details, see Types and operations.
api_name (string): The identifier of the Kontent API that the notification relates to. Possible values are delivery_production for the Delivery API, delivery_preview for the Delivery Preview API, and content_management for the Management API.
project_id (string): The project's ID.
webhook_url (string): A publicly available URL address of your webhook endpoint, for example, https://example.com/cache-invalidate.
created_timestamp (string): ISO-8601Opens in a new window formatted UTC time and date, for example, YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ.

JSON
"message": {
  "id": "b357fa9f-15ad-422d-84c7-b6bebc512c50",
  "project_id": "11a3492b-cd32-0054-51d2-8234ec4244a6",
  "type": "content_item_variant",
  "operation": "change_workflow_step",
  "api_name": "content_management",
  "created_timestamp": "2019-07-18T15:07:17.6823904Z",
  "webhook_url": "https://example.com/invalidate-cache"
}
"message": {
  "id": "b357fa9f-15ad-422d-84c7-b6bebc512c50",
  "project_id": "11a3492b-cd32-0054-51d2-8234ec4244a6",
  "type": "content_item_variant",
  "operation": "change_workflow_step",
  "api_name": "content_management",
  "created_timestamp": "2019-07-18T15:07:17.6823904Z",
  "webhook_url": "https://example.com/invalidate-cache"
}

Want to parse the headers first?

The information from the Message object is also contained in the HTTP headers of the POST request. You can use the headers to preprocess the notifications without examining the payload.

Each HTTP header has the suffix X-KC-Message. For example, the project_id property is mirrored by the X-KC-Message-Project-Id header.

Types and operations

The values of the type and operation properties in the Message object tell you what changed in your project and how. The type property answers the what and the operation property answers the how.

Here is a list of some of the possible type and operation pairs along with descriptions of what changed in each case. More than one event might be triggered for a given type-operation pair.

asset type
- upsert operation – For one or more assets used in published content items, the asset description was changed.
content_item type
- upsert operation – For a published content item, the item's name was changed.
content_item_variant type
- archive operation – The language variant of a content item was deleted.
- change_workflow_step operation – The language variant of a content item was moved to a different workflow step.
- restore operation – The language variant of a content item was restored in a specific language after deletion.
- publish operation – The language variant of a content item was published.
- unpublish operation – The language variant of a content item was unpublished.
content_type type
- upsert operation – The content type of published content items was changed.
language_settings type
- upsert operation – The language's codename was changed.
project type
- archive operation – The project was archived.
- restore operation – The project was restored.
taxonomy type
- archive operation – A taxonomy group was deleted.
- restore operation – A taxonomy group was restored after deletion.
- upsert operation – A taxonomy group was changed.

Outbound IP addresses

If your application runs behind a firewall, you might need to add rules for specific IP addresses so that your app can receive the notifications.

Kontent may send webhook notifications from the following IP addresses.

13.69.68.1
40.115.59.104
104.47.142.248
104.47.143.150
104.47.144.212
104.47.161.32
104.47.161.68
104.47.161.137

The list is subject to change.

What's next?

Set up webhooks for your project and app and learn about the common use cases.
Programatically manage your webhooks.

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