Webhook Limitations: How to handle Webhooks for Multi-Environment Setup?

Hey ​@luca-köster!

These feature requests have all been shared with the team, though I don’t have an ETA at this time on if and when they can be supported. 

In the meantime, the workaround that I’d recommend is to separate out your apps into RevenueCat projects by environment and then use one webhook URL for each project with “All apps” selected. This would allow you to send all Dev events to one backend, all Prod events to another, and so on.

Does this approach seem like it could work for you currently?

Hey, yes — I think this would work. However, I realized that webhooks don’t always fire in the correct order (for example, “Cancel” events sometimes arrive before the “First Purchase”). Because of that, I decided to switch my strategy to client-side polling. It’s more robust and doesn’t require a complete overhaul of my project.

By the way, just as some feedback — setting up multiple environments (which is considered best practice) has been extremely difficult. It’s taken me more than eight working days, and the process is really complex and hard to maintain. Setting up six apps in the stores and getting them approved for closed testing took a huge amount of time. And every time I want to update something, I have to repeat the process six times manually — which makes it very error-prone.

Maybe this is something the team could think about improving. What currently takes eight days could take just eight minutes if we were allowed to set three bundle IDs (with 2/3 just being sandboxes or API calls under the hood idk). As it stands, the developer experience has been really frustrating.

I’ll definitely share your feedback and experience internally. Thank you for taking the time!

Also curious about whether or not multiple environments require multiple projects.  I don’t understand how even sandbox purchases work with a single webhook URL...

I need 2 webhooks also (major oversight about dev v prod environments).  Some additional questions:

1. Will I really need to setup multiple Apps in Apple & Google so that I can have 2 webhooks?
2. I also need the Web Billing integration.  How do I configure a single Stripe account across 2 projects, while having a Prod v Dev project in RevenueCat?  I understand each RC project environment has its own “sandbox”.  Stripe also has a Sandbox, but I don’t know if that should be used, or if we need to also setup a 2nd app in Stripe to cover the “dev” environments/projects.
3. Anything else I am missing?

Hey ​@lucksp,

You don’t need multiple projects for multiple environments - the particular use case in the above post is pretty specific scenario of splitting up each environment and platform into it’s own app. 

You have the ability to set up five separate webhook URLs per project, and in each URL set up, you’ll have the ability to choose a specific app and if you’d like production events sent, sandbox events, or both. RevenueCat will automatically detect the environment of transactions from each environment - if you’re using test mode in Stripe, we will send a sandbox webhook event, for example.

More information in the docs here: https://www.revenuecat.com/docs/integrations/webhooks