Outpost is a self-hosted and open-source infrastructure that enables event producers to add outbound webhooks and Event Destinations to their platform with support for destination types such as Webhooks, Hookdeck Event Gateway, Amazon EventBridge, AWS SQS, AWS SNS, GCP Pub/Sub, RabbitMQ, and Kafka.

The Outpost runtime has minimal dependencies (Redis, PostgreSQL or Clickhouse, and one of the supported message queues), is 100% backward compatible with your existing webhooks implementation and is optimized for high-throughput, low-cost operation.

Outpost is built and maintained by Hookdeck. It's written in Go and distributed as a binary and Docker container under the Apache-2.0 license.

Read Outpost Concepts to learn more about the Outpost architecture and design.

• Event topics and topic-based subscriptions: Supports the common publish and subscription paradigm to ease adoption and integration into existing systems.
• Publish events via the API or a queue: Publish events using the Outpost API or configure Outpost to read events from a publish queue.
• At least once delivery guarantee: Messages are guaranteed to be delivered at least once and never lost.
• Event fanout: A message is sent to a topic is replicated and sent to multiple endpoints. This allows for parallel processing and asynchronous event notifications.
• Automatic and manual retries: Configure retry strategies for event destinations and manually trigger event delivery retries via the API or user portal.
• Multi-tenant support: Create multiple tenants on a single Outpost deployment.
• User portal: Allow customers to view metrics, manage, debug, and observe their event destinations.
• Delivery failure alerts: Manage event delivery failure alerts.
• OpenTelemetry: OTel standardized traces, metrics, and logs.
• Event destination types: Out of the box support for Webhooks, Hookdeck Event Gateway, Amazon EventBridge, AWS SQS, AWS SNS. GCP Pub/Sub, RabbitMQ, and Kafka.
• Webhook best practices: Opt-out webhook best practices, such as headers for idempotency, timestamp and signature, and signature rotation.
• SDKs and MCP server: Go, Python, and TypeScript SDK are available. Outpost also ships with an MCP server. All generated by Speakeasy.

See the Outpost Features for more information.

The Outpost documentation is built using the Zudoku documentation framework.

Ensure you have Docker installed.

Clone the Outpost repo:

git clone https://github.com/hookdeck/outpost.git

Navigate to outpost/examples/docker-compose/:

cd outpost/examples/docker-compose/

Create a .env file from the example:

Update the $API_KEY value within the new .env file.

Start the Outpost dependencies and services:

docker-compose -f compose.yml -f compose-rabbitmq.yml -f compose-postgres.yml up

Check the services are running:

curl localhost:3333/api/v1/healthz

Wait until you get a OK% response.

Create a tenant with the following command, replacing $TENANT_ID with a unique identifier such as "your_org_name", and the $API_KEY with the value you set in your .env:

TENANT_ID=your_org_name
API_KEY=your_api_key
URL=your_webhook_url

curl --location --request PUT "localhost:3333/api/v1/$TENANT_ID" \
--header "Authorization: Bearer $API_KEY"

Run a local server exposed via a localtunnel or use a hosted service such as the Hookdeck Console to capture webhook events.

Create a webhook destination where events will be delivered to with the following command. Again, replace $TENANT_ID and $API_KEY. Also, replace $URL with the webhook destinations URL:

curl --location "localhost:3333/api/v1/$TENANT_ID/destinations" \
--header "Content-Type: application/json" \
--header "Authorization: Bearer $API_KEY" \
--data '{
    "type": "webhook",
    "topics": ["*"],
    "config": {
        "url": "'"$URL"'"
    }
}'

Publish an event, remembering to replace $API_KEY and $TENANT_ID:

curl --location "localhost:3333/api/v1/publish" \
--header "Content-Type: application/json" \
--header "Authorization: Bearer $API_KEY" \
--data '{
    "tenant_id": "'"$TENANT_ID"'",
    "topic": "user.created",
    "eligible_for_retry": true,
    "metadata": {
        "meta": "data"
    },
    "data": {
        "user_id": "userid"
    }
}'

Check the logs on your server or your webhook capture tool for the delivered event.

Get an Outpost portal link for the tenant:

curl "localhost:3333/api/v1/$TENANT_ID/portal" \
--header "Authorization: Bearer $API_KEY"

The response will look something like the following:

{ "redirect_url": "http://localhost:3333?token=$TOKEN" }

The token value is an API-generated JWT.

Open the redirect_url link to view the Outpost portal.

Continue to use the Outpost API or the Outpost portal to add and test more destinations.

See CONTRIBUTING.

This repository contains Outpost, covered under the Apache License 2.0, except where noted (any Outpost logos or trademarks are not covered under the Apache License, and should be explicitly noted by a LICENSE file.)