Best Practices

The best practices that we should follow

Secondary database connection for inbox messages

Instead of bulking everything under 1 database, consider using another database for inbox (if your applications are big)

PROs:

• The inbox is independent & isolated from the main DB.

• Increase the High Availability for Inbox.

  • Just in case you have an incident from the application, Inbox would still collect webhook requests

    • Recovery is much faster and less "manual" work.

Dedicated instance for Inbox Process

To achieve "High Availability", consider running the Inbox HTTP in a dedicated server/docker instance.

This would isolate the Inbox from the whole Application. And Inbox just stands there, blindly receiving and appending messages without any dependencies.

Handler with Single Responsibility

Yup, don't put a lot into 1 Inbox Handler class, you can always do:

if ($payload['event'] !== 'event_A') {
   return;
}

// handle Event A here

Just like how we are using the Laravel Events/Listeners, feel free to bind many handlers for the topic.

(v1.1.1+) Authorize and Validate your Request

Usually, third-party services would provide us a way to sign and validate the payload to ensure we are receiving the legit ones.

To achieve this, inside your custom FormRequest, you can add:

• authorize method: to encrypt and validate the signature

• rules method: to ensure the payload contains enough information

As the same as every Laravel request.