Scott W. Bradley

in which scottwb thinks out loud

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Quick and Dirty CampaignMonitor Webhook Management

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You’ve got a CampaignMonitor mailing list and you’re using their API to add/update/remove subscribers as they sign up for your app and opt-in to your mailing list. Great. But you also want to know when they unsubscribe from your newsletter, or when an existing user subscribes via a separate newsletter form on your website, and be able to keep that information sync’d with your user database.

CampaignMonitor provides the ability to create Webhooks that will drive an HTTP POST callback to your app when subscribe/unsubscribe events happen. Once you dive into this, you’ll realize that you also need a way to deploy and update your webhooks. They only allow you to do this through their API – there is no GUI for it.

I threw together a quick-and-dirty Rakefile using the createsend gem. First make sure you have either done gem install createsend or have added the createsend gem to your Gemfile. Then, you can create a Rakefile that looks something like this:

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API_KEY = 'your_secret_api_key_here'
LIST_ID = 'your_mailing_list_id_here'  # Get this from the "change type" page for the list
WEBHOOK_URL = 'http://example.com/path/to/your_webhook.json'

def campaign_monitor_list
  CreateSend::List.new({:api_key => API_KEY}, LIST_ID)
end

# NOTE: That I depend on :environment for all of these. That is to load the
#       Rails environment I use them in. You can change that and require 'createsend'
#       explicitly if you like.
namespace :campaign_monitor do
  namespace :webhooks do
    desc "List all the CampaignMonitor webhooks"
    task :list => :environment do
      puts campaign_monitor_list.webhooks.inspect
    end

    desc "Register all our CampaignMonitor webhooks"
    task :create => :environment do
      campaign_monitor_list.create_webhook(
        ["Subscribe", "Deactivate"],
        WEBHOOK_URL,
        'json'
      )
    end

    desc "Test all our CampaignMonitor webhooks"
    task :test => :environment do
      list = campaign_monitor_list
      list.webhooks.each do |hook|
        list.test_webhook(hook[:WebhookID])
      end
    end

    desc "Uninstall all our CampaignMonitor webhooks"
    task :clear => :environment do
      list = campaign_monitor_list
      list.webhooks.each do |hook|
        list.delete_webhook(hook[:WebhookID])
      end
    end
  end
end

With this saved as campaign_monitor.rake and loaded by rake, you will now have the following tasks you can integrate into your deployment system:

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% rake -T campaign_monitor:webhooks
rake campaign_monitor:webhooks:clear   # Uninstall all our CampaignMonitor webhooks
rake campaign_monitor:webhooks:create  # Register all our CampaignMonitor webhooks
rake campaign_monitor:webhooks:list    # List all the CampaignMonitor webhooks
rake campaign_monitor:webhooks:test    # Test all our CampaignMonitor webhooks

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