Testing Webhooks Without Deploying Anything

You are integrating with a payment processor. When a payment completes, they send a POST request to your webhook URL with the transaction details. To test this, you need a publicly accessible URL that your local machine can receive requests on. Your localhost is not publicly accessible. Deploying to staging just to test a webhook is overkill. This is the fundamental problem of webhook development: the sender (a third-party service) needs to reach the receiver (your code), but during development, your code is on localhost. Solutions in ascending complexity Webhook testing services. Services like webhook.site or RequestBin generate a temporary public URL. Any request sent to that URL is captured and displayed. You can inspect headers, body, and metadata. This is the fastest way to verify that a webhook is being sent and to see its payload structure. Tunnel services. ngrok, Cloudflare Tunnel, or localtunnel expose your localhost on a public URL. The webhook hits the public URL, which tunn