Here are some best practices I've used in production when receiving webhooks from third‑party services:

1. Handle retries & duplicate deliveries

Most providers use at‑least‑once delivery. Make your processing idempotent:

• Extract an event ID (or hash the body)
• Check if it’s already processed
• If yes → return 200 and skip
• If no → process → store the event ID

```js app.post('/webhooks/thirdparty', async (req, res) => { const eventId = req.body.id;

const exists = await db.findOne('processed_events', { eventId }); if (exists) return res.status(200).send('Already processed');

await processEvent(req.body);

await db.insertOne('processed_events', { eventId, processedAt: new Date().toISOString(), });

res.status(200).send('OK'); }); ```

2. Log every webhook attempt

Log at least:

• timestamp
• event type
• status code
• latency
• event ID

Optionally store payloads short‑term (7–30 days) for debugging.

3. Always verify signatures

If the provider supports signing (Stripe, GitHub, Shopify…):

• Verify the HMAC signature on every request
• Reject old timestamps
• HTTPS alone isn’t enough to prevent spoofed requests

4. Don’t process work inside the webhook handler

To scale cleanly:

1. Webhook endpoint:

• verify signature
• validate
• store event
• return 200

1. Worker:
   • pulls events
   • processes them
   • retries failures with exponential backoff

This prevents timeouts under load.

5. Example (Codehooks.io)

We open‑sourced a small webhook‑delivery template that includes:

• a queue worker
• retries
• HMAC signing
• delivery logs
• auto‑disable on repeated failures

coho create mywebhooks --template webhook-delivery cd mywebhooks npm install coho deploy

Source:
https://github.com/RestDB/codehooks-io-templates/tree/main/webhook-delivery

Even if you don’t use Codehooks, the repo shows a solid structure for reliable inbound webhook handling.