WeatherFlow Webhooks

Nezmo · January 5, 2024, 5:59pm

Old thread but my query is related.

I am looking to see if I can change a few SharpTools rules from getting weather updates via API to using Webhooks. I use the WeatherFlow service which has Webhook support. I can get a connection to establish and get messages back using a tester tool but I can’t figure out how to send the response data to SharpTools to trigger a rule. I get the creating of a SharpTools rule with a trigger URL - just not sure what I need to do to get a Webhook response to point to that. Do I need an actual external app to handle that?

josh · January 5, 2024, 6:34pm

Hi @Nezmo - I hope you don’t mind that I’ve moved this post into it’s own topic with a more relevant title.

Are you saying that your WeatherFlow service can call an external webhook and post data over to that webhook endpoint? Do you have a link to the relevant documentation? I couldn’t find anything about WeatherFlow Tempest Webhooks from a quick search… just Websockets which are completely different.

If it supports calling a webhook, you would create a SharpTools rule with an HTTP Trigger, then copy the URL that gets generated in the rule’s HTTP Trigger to use as your webhook endpoint in your source system.

I’m also quoting some of the relevant details from the other thread with a summary of the distinction between HTTP Triggers and HTTP Actions as the concept of a ‘webhook’ is contextual and depends on the source and destination.

Custom Webhook?

Yes, SharpTools can receive Webhook events via an HTTP Trigger in SharpTools Rules. You can find more details in the following article:

How to trigger SharpTools rules using HTTP - SharpTools Knowledge Base

SharpTools can also emit Webhooks via the HTTP action in SharpTools Rules. You can find more details on that here:

HTTP Rule Action - SharpTools Knowledge Base

As for reasons for being able to receive webhooks (HTTP Trigger) or send webhooks (HTTP Actions), I suspect that the examples in the documentation helps cover that. There’s a ton of software and services out there which offer HTTP APIs / webhooks, so this greatly opens up the possibilities for integrations.

You can use inbound webhooks (HTTP Trigger) to receive events from other apps like IFTTT, Tasker, Blue Iris, etc. We even recently made some tweaks to better support the somewhat quirky format that Plex Media Player uses as one of our community members wanted to react to the playing and pausing of content to automate lights in their media room.

Outbound webhooks (HTTP Actions) have a similar utility in that you can integrate with a wide variety of external services. From pushing data to IFTTT, WebCoRE, Zapier, or similar ‘rule’ services to retrieving data from your favorite services (Weather, Joke of the Day, esoteric smart devices) or forwarding actions on to other platforms (eg. triggering scenes in an unsupported platform like Homeseer).

The sky’s the limit as long as the service you want to interact with has some sort of HTTP interface (REST API / Webhooks).

Nezmo · January 5, 2024, 6:42pm

Not at all.

And here lies the problem - my ignorance. I did not realize they were two different things. What I have been looking at is WeatherFlow Websockets..

So my guess is I’m out of luck.

josh · January 5, 2024, 6:55pm

It seems like someone else in the community wrote a listener that forwards events as HTTP requestsd to a SharpTools Rule HTTP Trigger:

Perhaps they would be willing to share what they put together?

Edit: I would also note that in theory you could create a small always-on service that connects to the WeatherFlow websocket endpoint and listens for events and forwards them. Of course, that would require the requisite developer skills.

Someone else was using IFTTT as a middleman to get the data from WeatherFlow and then forward it on as an HTTP Request (they were doing it with WebCoRE, but some concepts apply):

Nezmo · January 5, 2024, 7:04pm

Thank you. It’s evident I was searching on the wrong terms before. I will dig in on what you found.