When integrating Shopify webhooks with an internal API protected by the Kong API Gateway, one of the first—and most critical—challenges you’ll encounter is authentication. Shopify signs its webhook payloads using an HMAC-SHA256 signature, which is delivered in a custom HTTP header (x-shopify-hmac-sha256). Unfortunately, this doesn’t align neatly with standard authentication mechanisms, especially those built into…
Category: Programming & Development
Coding Tutorials (Python, JavaScript, Java, etc.)
Web Development (HTML, CSS, React, etc.)
Mobile App Development
APIs & Microservices
DevOps & CI/CD
How to Validate the HMAC Hash in Kong Gateway for Shopify Webhooks
When integrating Shopify webhooks with Kong Gateway, one common challenge is validating the HMAC signature provided by Shopify. At the time of writing, there is no built-in Kong plugin that can directly read and validate the HMAC value passed in the X-Shopify-Hmac-Sha256 header. Shopify does not allow customizing this header to use Kong’s standard HMAC…
Unit vs Integration vs End-to-End Testing: What’s the Difference and Why It Matters
Testing is the backbone of reliable software development. But with so many testing strategies—Unit, Integration, and End-to-End (E2E)—it’s easy to get confused about what each one does and when to use them. In this post, we’ll break down these three approaches, their purpose, and how they fit into a robust testing strategy.