Hooksy

Hooksy is a local-first webhook capture tool. It gives you a public URL you can hand to any external service, stores whatever it sends locally, and lets you inspect the requests in a clean UI — all running on your own machine.

It's a personal utility in the spirit of RequestBin or webhook.site, but with no accounts, no cloud storage, and no server to trust — everything lives in a local SQLite file.

Install

npm install

Start

npm start

This builds the frontend and server, then starts everything: the local HTTP server, the UI, SQLite persistence, and a public tunnel. It also opens the UI in your default browser automatically. If you'd rather it didn't, set HOOKSY_NO_OPEN=1 npm start.

For active development, use:

npm run dev

This runs the Vite dev server and the API server together with hot reload.

Other scripts:

npm run build      # build frontend + server
npm run typecheck  # type-check both frontend and server

Creating a listener URL

Click Create listener URL in the top bar. Enter a name for the bin, e.g. PayPal Sandbox — Hooksy normalizes it into a URL-safe path (paypal-sandbox) and shows the full listener URL live as you type:

https://<your-public-url>/hook/paypal-sandbox

Copy it with the Copy URL button and paste it into the external service's webhook settings. The modal also lists your existing bins so you can quickly grab a URL for one you've already used.

If the public tunnel isn't connected yet, the modal falls back to your local URL and warns you that external services won't be able to reach it until the tunnel is up.

Using it with external webhooks

Hooksy accepts any HTTP method at:

/hook/:binName
/hook/:binName/anything/else

Whatever you send — GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE, etc. — is captured and grouped under binName. Every request gets a 200 { "ok": true } response, which is what most webhook providers expect to consider delivery successful.

JSON bodies are parsed and stored both as pretty-printed JSON and as the raw payload. Form bodies and multipart uploads are also parsed (for file uploads, only metadata — field name, filename, content type, size — is kept, not the file contents). Anything else is stored as a raw body so you can still inspect it without Hooksy crashing on unexpected content types.

How the public tunnel works

On startup, Hooksy opens a tunnel using localtunnel, which proxies a public HTTPS URL to your local server. No account or token is required for the default flow.

The UI shows both URLs:

Local:  http://localhost:61337
Public: https://<random-id>.loca.lt

If the tunnel fails to connect, Hooksy keeps running locally — you'll see a clear warning that external services can't reach it until the tunnel is restored. Use the Restart tunnel button in the UI to try again.

Disabling the tunnel

If you only need local capture (e.g. testing with a service that can already reach localhost, or via your own reverse proxy), disable the tunnel with an environment variable:

HOOKSY_DISABLE_TUNNEL=1 npm start

Where data is stored

Captured requests and bins are stored in a local SQLite database at:

data/hooksy.db

relative to the project root. Nothing is sent anywhere else. Hooksy keeps the latest 1,000 requests by default and automatically prunes older ones.

Clearing captured data

From the UI:

• Delete request — removes a single selected request.
• Clear "<bin>" — removes all requests in the currently selected bin, but keeps the bin itself.
• Delete "<bin>" — permanently removes the bin along with every request in it.
• Clear all — removes every captured request across all bins.

All of these ask for confirmation before deleting anything.

Pausing capture

Click Pause capture to stop storing new requests. While paused, incoming requests still get a 200 { "ok": true } response (so the sender doesn't see failures or retries) — they're just not saved. Useful when a service is retrying aggressively or being noisy while you're not actively testing.

What Hooksy is not

Hooksy is a single-user local tool. It intentionally has no login, accounts, teams, permissions, cloud sync, or hosted deployment — just npm start and a webhook inbox on your machine.