--- title: YouTube API webhooks - PubSubHubbub a.k.a. WebSub with Rails slug: youtube-api-webhooks-pubsubhubbub-a-k-a-websub-with-rails published_at: 2022-08-02 12:30:14 +0000 updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:13:27 +0000 summary: description: In this episode, you'll learn how to handle webhooks from the YouTube Data API using PubSubHubbub or WebSub with Ruby on Rails. h/t to Sunday Club's live stream here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyTjGWLyUqA ## Table of contents 00:00 Introduction 01:23 Generate a new Webhooks controller 02:53 Start ngrok tunnel 04:05 Verify PubSubHubbub callback URL 06:51 Handle atom notification 08:14 Create a background job to handle notification 13:46 Conclusion #rails #rubyonrails #webhook #rails #rubyonrails tags: [cjav_dev, web development tutorials, web development for beginners, vim, ruby, rails, ruby on rails, ruby on rails tutorial, webhooks tutorial, webhook tutorial, pubsubhubnub, youtube api, youtube api v3, ruby on rails project, web development tutorial, webhook example, ruby on rails 2022, ruby on rails 7, ruby on rails web development, youtube api tutorial, pubsubhubbub youtube, rails 7] views: 5761 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/youtube-api-webhooks-pubsubhubbub-a-k-a-websub-with-rails youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQSJGS2JR4w youtube_id: QQSJGS2JR4w embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/QQSJGS2JR4w thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/QQSJGS2JR4w/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # YouTube API webhooks - PubSubHubbub a.k.a. WebSub with Rails *Published: August 02, 2022* *Views: 5761* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQSJGS2JR4w) [![YouTube API webhooks - PubSubHubbub a.k.a. WebSub with Rails](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/QQSJGS2JR4w/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQSJGS2JR4w) ## Description In this episode, you'll learn how to handle webhooks from the YouTube Data API using PubSubHubbub or WebSub with Ruby on Rails. h/t to Sunday Club's live stream here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyTjGWLyUqA ## Table of contents 00:00 Introduction 01:23 Generate a new Webhooks controller 02:53 Start ngrok tunnel 04:05 Verify PubSubHubbub callback URL 06:51 Handle atom notification 08:14 Create a background job to handle notification 13:46 Conclusion #rails #rubyonrails #webhook #rails #rubyonrails ## Transcript what's up welcome back in this episode we're going to talk about handling web hook notifications from the youtube api now these are called uh pub sub hub bub the integration or the new name for this type of integration is called web sub and there was very little information about how to do this on the internet so i'm excited to try to like make some documentation and just share what i've learned about how to set this up so the way this works is we're going to first set up a callback url where we will receive notifications from some hub the next thing we're going to do is go over to the google hub which is at pubsubhubbub.appspot.com subscribe this is where we're going to enter our publicly accessible callback url and then a topic which is essentially just referenced to the channel id we're going to go through a verification step and then we'll have access to receive post post requests with an atom which is kind of just this like atom feed sort of looks like an rss feed and it will contain the id of the youtube video and the uh id of the channel where we can go and retrieve the video that was either updated or uploaded or changed there's not very many activities that you can listen for changes on but there's just enough that i think it'll be useful for us so what we want to do is the first thing we're going to do is we're going to generate a new controller called the web hooks controller now inside of our routes file we're going to add resources web hooks now in our web hooks controller because we're receiving a notification from a third party we want to skip our before action that verifies authenticity tokens because we won't actually be able to handle any csrf checks um because it's a third party we're not like embedding anything into our forms so we'll have a create method and we'll also have an index method here now the create method this is going to be where we're handling post requests from uh from youtube that are going to have that um that atom feed in inside of it so handle atom notification from pub sub hubbub and then our index this is going to be like our verify uh our verify pub sub hub callback okay now the way that this works is that inside of our index and this is part of the pub sub hubbub spec we need to return some challenge that is in the request for our verification so this is like down in the belly of the beast of the the actual spec was where i found this because there's again there's like really not very much content out there on the internet about how to do this so for now what we can do is we'll just p params for the index and we'll render back a status of json or json status of okay now we've got our rail server running here i want to fire up ngrok so ngrok is a way to set up a tunnel to your local machine that will give you a publicly accessible url so we can say ngrok http 3000 this fires up a brand new um url to which um we will if we receive requests on that url they'll be forwarded in there's another really cool thing here is you can just open up the web interface and see any requests that are coming in so if we were to just load that page deceptive site ahead okay whatever details um yes i want to continue visiting the unsafe site ah right okay so we will need to add ngrok as um to our list of hosts so from applicationrb i'm just going to disable um this host check uh config.hosts is equal to nil that's going to disable the host check so that we can use this locally and we should be able to go here once we restart and now we can see our page so this is uh if we go back to the inspect tab we'll see that that request came in so we can see the favicon uh favicon request we're getting pulling in application json or whatever you can basically just you can see all of the requests okay click clear requests now we're going to use this domain webhooks as the callback url now the topic url we want this to be set to this string plus our channel id so we need to go find our channel id so youtube.com and let's see your channel it should be this welcome okay so i will drop in my channel id the verification type i wasn't able to get asynchronous working i'm not sure how that actually why async didn't work so we're going to use synchronous instead i did not pass a verify hmac or lease seconds in so i think this should just create the subscription for us okay so here we see challenge mismatch now if we look at our request that came in we see this get request and these are the query string parameters so we have a challenge let's make this bigger we have the hub challenge the lease in seconds the mode and the topic now this hub.challenge we need to make our response render this value back when we receive a get request to slash webhooks in order to verify that we own that so let's go back to our webhooks controller inside of our index action we will just say um maybe like if params if the params has this thing then render plane of that okay so now what we can do is go back to our verification flow and click on do it again and we got a no op so when you click it and it refreshes but you don't actually see anything i think that's in practice actually doing it's doing a no-op so now here if we see now we see this 200 um and we can look in the response body and we can see that that is actually the hub challenge so now we we have a sense that something may have happened or we don't actually get very much feedback that anything happened so if you're wondering like hey did i actually subscribe to this what you can do is grab your callback url drop it down here grab the topic drop that down here and say get info and this will tell you a bunch of information about the subscription including its state so this tells us that it is verified all right so now we're in a good place so we have connected to this this hub the pubsubhubbub.appspot.com hub and now we should receive notifications as a subscriber to this endpoint when things change on our videos so if we go over to um our yeah so our create endpoint is where we're going to handle those updates but if we head over to our channel and go to our the youtube studio and we crack open a video so let's just say one of these most recent videos here import dev2 articles and now let's say we enter in some spaces and a smiley and click on save this should fire an update where we receive a post request now this takes a little bit of time and i don't i mean like obviously this is flowing through a bunch of different systems so that change to the description there we go okay so it just landed so that change to the description is going to flow through and now we're receiving this as a post request so we didn't render any response back because we don't actually have a template we're not actually handling this in any way but you can see that this is the id of the video here so r on gk whatever and that's the same as this video that we just edited okay so now we're getting notifications that this video is changing indeed we also get a little bit of information we see the title here we also see the you know the author when it was published at but we don't actually see the description or any of the details about what was changed so what i want to do is take the id of the video and re-fetch it or do some sort of automation so i'm going to do that in a background job i don't want to do that right here so what i'm going to do instead is say rails g model youtube youtube event and this is going to have the data this is the raw data it's also going to have some a status of whether it's processed and then like processing errors in case it fails when we process this in the background uh what else do we need let's see i think maybe we should also store the id of the video on the event level i think this is fine let's just start with this okay so so inside of our web hooks controller we're going to say event is youtube event.new or dot create bang with data is request.body.read and then the status by default the status will be will be pending and then what we want to do is handle the event in the background so we're going to make a new a new thing called railsg job youtube event handler so we're going to have our youtube event handler.process later event perform later for our event all right so now inside of we'll say railsdb migrate inside of our youtube event here we can set an enum up for status and we'll say it is um pending processing processed failed and this gives us a bunch of different statuses so by default i think we want it to be pending say railsdb rollback and then we'll open our create youtube events thing and say the status is default to pending actually i kind of want this to be an integer too and we'll default it to zero okay rails db migrate all right so then this becomes something different pending processing processed sure failed all right and then we have our data and okay so this should be a good start so now if we go back to our web hooks controller i think everything looks good so we're creating the event we've got to perform later we'll just render json of status okay sure this seems good now let's go make another change to oh in fact like inside of our youtube event handler uh job we don't actually have anything that we're performing so here we're gonna say something like event and what i really want to do is say like okay find or create a new youtube video by id and then if the video already exists update it with the new data otherwise create it but for now we'll just say like puts yeah event.data so we're going to handle that event.data somehow and i think what we want to do is um handle we want to read in that xml there's a bunch of different xml parsers there's like atom feed specific things um in a live stream that i watched showing how to do this the it was sunday something i'll add a link to the description in the description um he used uh hash from xml so that might be an option that we might uh use here otherwise we will just kind of look directly at the data okay so let's let's um let's take a look here what we want to do is we want to go and update another video so now i'll just remove the smiley and click save and this should cause a post request to come in through ngrok again it's going to take a little while but theoretically we should be creating an object in the database that we can then go and mess around with boom okay we got a a 200 ok from our post request to slash webhooks we can look in the server log we see a bunch of stuff came in here we have our our output youtube event handler job ran and we have this um this xml that was output so if we open up rails console we can say you tube event dot last and we can see all of this data is the xml for the object that came in can we say from xml youtube event.last.data boom okay so then the thing that we really care about is this video id we can go out and fetch that and use it to continue populating all of our information all right so what's really cool about this is that we can now automatically listen for changes instead of polling for any of those updates i think we'll leave it there this is how you can integrate directly with the youtube api to receive push notifications when something changes in the title or the description or a brand new video is uploaded thanks so much for watching really appreciate it and if you're liking this kind of content please give me a thumbs up and a subscribe and we'll see you in the next one [Music] you --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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