Set up your server

For the purposes of this tutorial, we're going to use a local server to receive messages from EverTransit. For this, we will use NodeJS and express to create our local development environment, and ngrok to expose our local development environment to the internet.

Note: You can download the complete source code for this project from the EverTransit-webhooks-example repo.

Creating our local development environment

First of all, we need to have NodeJS installed. If you don't have it installed, you can install it from here.

Next, we create our little NodeJS project and install the necessary dependencies.

mkdir evertransit-webhooks && cd evertransit-webhooks && touch index.js

npm init --yes

npm install express

Expose local development to the internet

We'll use ngrok to do this. ngrok is available, free of charge, for all major operating systems. For more information, see the ngrok download page.

After installing ngrok, you can expose your localhost by running ngrok http 3000 on the command line. 3000 is the port number on which our server will listen for messages. You should see a line that looks something like this:

Make a note of the https://*.ngrok.io URL. We'll use it to set up our webhook.