Outpost

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Production-ready infrastructure for sending webhooks and delivering events from your platform to your customers' systems. Self-host it anywhere, or use Hookdeck Outpost as a managed service.

Add outbound webhooks and Event Destinations to your platform, with support for Webhooks, Hookdeck Event Gateway, Amazon EventBridge, AWS SQS, AWS Kinesis, AWS S3, GCP Pub/Sub, Azure Service Bus, RabbitMQ, Kafka, and Cloudflare Queues. Outpost handles retries, tenant isolation, observability, and provides a portal for your end users.

The runtime has minimal dependencies (Redis/Redis cluster, PostgreSQL, a supported message queue), is 100% backward compatible with your existing webhook implementation, and is optimized for high-throughput, low-cost operation.

Outpost is built and maintained by Hookdeck. Written in Go. Distributed as a binary and Docker container. Licensed under Apache-2.0.

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

Features

• Multi-tenant support: Create multiple tenants on a single Outpost deployment.
• User portal: Allow customers to view delivery metrics, manage destinations, debug delivery issues, and observe their event destinations.
• Delivery failure alerts: Get notified when destinations are failing so you can act before your customers notice.
• Event topics and topic-based subscriptions: Supports the common publish and subscription paradigm to ease adoption and integration into existing systems.
• At least once delivery guarantee: Messages are guaranteed to be delivered at least once and never lost.
• Automatic and manual retries: Configure retry strategies for event destinations and manually trigger event delivery retries via the API or user portal.
• Event fanout: A message sent to a topic is replicated and delivered to multiple endpoints for parallel processing and asynchronous event notifications.
• Publish events via the API or a queue: Publish events using the Outpost API or configure Outpost to read events from a publish queue.
• OpenTelemetry: OTel standardized traces, metrics, and logs.
• 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 SDKs are available. Outpost also ships with an MCP server.
• Event destination types: Out of the box support for Webhooks, Hookdeck Event Gateway, Amazon EventBridge, AWS SQS, AWS Kinesis, AWS S3, GCP Pub/Sub, Azure Service Bus, RabbitMQ, Kafka, and Cloudflare Queues.

See the Outpost Features for more information.

Why Outpost

Outpost is a good fit if:

• You're adding outbound webhooks to your platform for the first time
• You're replacing a homegrown webhook system that's become a maintenance burden
• You want to offer your customers more than just HTTP callbacks (queues, brokers, buses)
• You need multi-tenant isolation with a customer-facing portal out of the box
• You want full control over your infrastructure and data

Outpost is backward compatible with your existing payload format, HTTP headers, and signatures — you can drop it into what you already have.

Documentation

In-repo Markdown for hookdeck.com/docs/outpost lives under docs/content/ (and images under docs/public/images/). Pushes to main that touch those paths run a GitHub Action that notifies Hookdeck to trigger a Vercel redeploy of the marketing site.

• Overview
• Concepts
• Quickstarts
• Features
• Guides
• API Reference
• Configuration Reference

Quickstart

Deploy to Railway

Once deployed, set the TOPICS environment variable to your supported topics (e.g. TOPICS=user.created,user.updated,user.deleted). You'll need the public Railway URL of your Outpost instance ($OUTPOST_URL) and the generated API_KEY to authenticate requests.

Deploy locally with Docker

git clone https://github.com/hookdeck/outpost.git
cd outpost/examples/docker-compose/
cp .env.example .env

Update the API_KEY value in the .env file, then start the services:

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

Outpost is now running on localhost:3333.

See the Configuration Reference for Redis cluster setup, TLS, and other deployment options.

Try it out

Set your environment variables:

export OUTPOST_URL=http://localhost:3333
export API_KEY=your_api_key

Create a tenant, add a webhook destination, and publish an event:

# Create a tenant
curl -X PUT "$OUTPOST_URL/api/v1/tenants/acme-corp" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $API_KEY"

# Create a webhook destination
curl "$OUTPOST_URL/api/v1/tenants/acme-corp/destinations" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $API_KEY" \
  -d '{
    "type": "webhook",
    "topics": ["*"],
    "config": { "url": "https://your-endpoint.com/webhooks" }
  }'

# Publish an event
curl "$OUTPOST_URL/api/v1/publish" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $API_KEY" \
  -d '{
    "tenant_id": "acme-corp",
    "topic": "user.created",
    "data": { "user_id": "123" }
  }'

Get a portal link for the tenant:

curl "$OUTPOST_URL/api/v1/tenants/acme-corp/portal" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $API_KEY"

Open the returned redirect_url to view the Outpost portal.

SDKs are available for Go, TypeScript, and Python. See the full quickstart guides for step-by-step setup with your stack.

Hookdeck Outpost (Managed)

Don't want to run the infrastructure yourself? Hookdeck Outpost is a fully managed version that runs the exact same codebase — no proprietary fork, no reduced feature set.

The managed service adds serverless scaling, SOC 2 compliance, SSO, RBAC, and usage-based pricing starting at $10 per million events.

Get started with Hookdeck Outpost →

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.

License

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.)