outpost

name	outpost
description	Sets up and configures Hookdeck Outpost for outbound event delivery to customer endpoints. Use when sending webhooks to customers, building webhook delivery infrastructure, configuring destinations (HTTP, SQS, RabbitMQ, Pub/Sub, EventBridge, Kafka), or managing tenants and subscriptions in Outpost.
allowed-tools	WebFetch

Hookdeck Outpost

Open-source outbound event delivery infrastructure by Hookdeck. Delivers your platform events directly to your users' preferred event destinations (webhooks, message queues, streaming platforms).

• Outpost docs
• GitHub
• API reference

Deployment Options

Option	Description	Best for
Self-hosted	Run via Docker, Kubernetes, or Railway. Full control. Apache-2.0 license.	Production with custom infra requirements
Managed	Hookdeck Cloud. No infrastructure to operate.	Teams wanting zero-ops setup

For managed, sign up at hookdeck.com. For self-hosted, see the quickstart below.

Supported Destination Types

Available: Webhooks (HTTP), Hookdeck Event Gateway, AWS SQS, AWS Kinesis, AWS S3, Azure Service Bus, GCP Pub/Sub, RabbitMQ (AMQP)

Planned: AWS EventBridge, Apache Kafka

Core Concepts

Tenants -- Represent a user, team, or organization in your product. Each tenant manages their own Destinations.

Destinations -- A specific instance of a destination type belonging to a tenant. For example, a webhook destination with a particular URL, or an SQS queue.

Topics -- Categorize events using a Pub/Sub pattern (e.g., user.created, payment.completed). Destinations subscribe to one or more topics, or * for all.

Events -- Data representing an action in your system. Published to a topic and delivered to all matching destinations.

Delivery Attempts -- Records of each attempt to deliver an event to a destination, including request/response data.

Self-Hosted Quick Start (Docker)

Requires Docker. Uses RabbitMQ for message queuing.

git clone https://github.com/hookdeck/outpost.git
cd outpost/examples/docker-compose/
cp .env.example .env
# Edit .env and set your API_KEY value
docker-compose -f compose.yml -f compose-rabbitmq.yml -f compose-postgres.yml up

Verify the services are running:

curl localhost:3333/api/v1/healthz

API Access

The Outpost API is a REST-based JSON API. The base URL and authentication differ by deployment:

Deployment	Base URL	Authentication
Self-hosted	http://localhost:3333/api/v1 (or your configured host)	Authorization: Bearer $API_KEY (the API_KEY env var you configured)
Managed	Provided in your Hookdeck project	Authorization: Bearer $HOOKDECK_API_KEY (from Dashboard > Settings > Secrets)

The OpenAPI spec for the self-hosted API is at: https://github.com/hookdeck/outpost/blob/main/docs/apis/openapi.yaml

All curl examples below use the self-hosted base URL. Replace localhost:3333/api/v1 with the managed URL and use your Hookdeck API key when using the managed version.

Publish Your First Event

Set shell variables for convenience:

BASE_URL=localhost:3333/api/v1
API_KEY=your_api_key
TENANT_ID=your_org_name
URL=https://your-webhook-endpoint.example.com

Create a tenant, add a webhook destination, and publish an event:

# Create tenant
curl -X PUT "$BASE_URL/$TENANT_ID" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $API_KEY"

# Create webhook destination subscribing to all topics
curl -X POST "$BASE_URL/$TENANT_ID/destinations" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $API_KEY" \
  -d '{
    "type": "webhook",
    "topics": ["*"],
    "config": { "url": "'"$URL"'" }
  }'

# Publish an event
curl -X POST "$BASE_URL/publish" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $API_KEY" \
  -d '{
    "tenant_id": "'"$TENANT_ID"'",
    "topic": "user.created",
    "eligible_for_retry": true,
    "data": { "user_id": "usr_123" }
  }'

Tenant Portal

Outpost includes a built-in portal UI where tenants manage their destinations and inspect events:

curl "$BASE_URL/$TENANT_ID/portal" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $API_KEY"
# Returns { "redirect_url": "...?token=<jwt>" }

Architecture

Outpost consists of three services (deployable together as a single binary or separately for horizontal scaling): API Service (captures events, configuration APIs), Delivery Service (delivers to destinations via message queues), and Log Service (stores events, status, responses). Requires Redis 6.0+, PostgreSQL, and one supported message queue. See concepts for details.

Future Skills

Destination-specific skills (outpost-webhooks, outpost-sqs, outpost-rabbitmq, etc.) will be added as Outpost documentation matures.

Deployment Quickstarts

• Docker | Kubernetes | Railway | Configuration reference

Related Skills

• hookdeck -- skill router for all Hookdeck skills
• event-gateway -- Hookdeck Event Gateway (inbound webhooks)