Webhook support on ESP32 devices

[ogarcia]

The truth is, I don't know if this has already been discussed somewhere. I haven't seen anything here, either in the bugs or in the discussions.

The idea would be that, if you have a module with ESP32 and WiFi/Ethernet enabled, it would support sending events via POST webhook directly to wherever you specify. This would allow the device to send the events it receives directly, without having to rely on a development that polls constantly via protobuf.

What do you think?

[CullenJWebb]

Wouldn't an MQTT bridge accomplish this?

Less dev time, technical debt, and device requirements.

[ogarcia]

IMHO, they are slightly different things.

A webhook POST notification is simple: a request sent to a specific endpoint with a JSON body containing the data. It requires nothing more than the sender and the receiver.

However, with MQTT, you need a broker, that is, a third intermediate element.

On the other hand, if you have both MQTT and push, you could use public MQTT on the one hand and push notifications to send yourself events in a more private way (I'm thinking mainly of non-public channels that you may have alongside public ones).

Note: With an MQTT bridge, you can use your server and then forward the data to the public server, but that is more complex than simply receiving a POST.

Update: Another thing that comes to mind is that not all events received by a node are retransmitted to MQTT. For example, if you receive a message via radio, it is not retransmitted to MQTT. However, your node does receive it, and if it had a webhook, it could send that event via a POST to wherever you wanted.