webhook-best-practices

Rules for building webhook handlers. Webhooks are automatic messages sent from one service to another when an event happens.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when receiving webhooks through Hookdeck, checking their signatures, and making handlers safe to run more than once.
Why use it?
It helps prevent unauthorised requests and avoids creating duplicate records when a service retries a message.

Cursor rule

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add rules/hookdeck/agent-skills/webhook-best-practices
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/hookdeck/agent-skills
Per session 20 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 313 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00020 $0.00313
Opus 5 $0.00010 $0.00156
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00063
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00031

Measured 2d ago against content hash 92e2db7bbea7, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

webhook-best-practices scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

rules/webhook-best-practices.mdc · 16 lines

What it actually says

Webhook Best Practices

When building webhook handlers:

  1. Always enable authentication at the source. Configure source authentication so Hookdeck verifies incoming requests (HMAC, Basic Auth, or API Key). Hookdeck rejects unverified requests and labels them "Verification Failed."

  2. Always verify the Hookdeck signature. Hookdeck adds x-hookdeck-signature to requests forwarded to your handler. Verify this header before processing. When source verification is enabled, Hookdeck also sets x-hookdeck-verified to true on requests that passed source verification—you do not need to verify the provider's signature separately; verifying the Hookdeck signature is sufficient. See Hookdeck webhook signature verification.

  3. Handlers must be idempotent. Webhooks can be retried and may arrive multiple times. Design handlers to safely handle duplicates (e.g., check for existing records before creating, use idempotency keys).

Docs: authentication, sources. For verification code and setup, use the event-gateway skill.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 16 lines · 20 tokens per session scan A 92e2db7bbea7

Subscribe to this mod's changes

webhook-best-practices is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository hookdeck/agent-skills (5 stars, last pushed 13d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 20 tokens to every session and 313 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.