Using sshreach.me to test your webhooks

Suppose you develop a web application and you want to use PayPal’s services to allow your customers to buy your goods or services through your web app. During development, you will, of course, use PayPal’s sandbox site where you can simulate and test the process of transferring funds from your customers to you. One of the mechanisms through which PayPal informs you of the money transfer is web notifications (in PayPal’s case they can be called webhooks or IPN or PDT API-s, but the process is similar). Simply said, web notifications or webhooks are special URLs in your web app, through which PayPal informs you of any changes made to your account.

With sshreach.me, you can just tunnel your development web server’s port through the sshreach.me’s tunnel and then set the PayPal’s notification URLs to the appropriate tunnel exit point. Furthermore, you can open and close the tunnel whenever you need to, so your development server is not visible on the whole internet all the time.

First, just create a new client and forward port number 80 (or whatever your dev server is listening to).

Once the client is created, you can find the entry point on the Info tab (for example: fw1.sshreach.me:10233)

All you need to do now is set up your PayPal’s notification URLs using the above info. For instance, to set up your PDT listener URL, like in this example:

And to set up your IPN listener URL:

Once these settings are saved, you can just open the tunnel and begin testing. When you are sure everything works properly, just close the tunnel and that’s it!