How to Set Up a Webhook Relay for Self-Hosted OpenClaw

If you self-host OpenClaw, you have probably hit this problem: external services like Stripe, GitHub, and Sentry need to send webhooks to your agent, but your agent is behind a firewall or NAT. The webhooks have nowhere to go.

The traditional solutions — port forwarding, ngrok tunnels, reverse proxies — all have drawbacks. They expire, they require configuration, and they break silently. A webhook relay solves this by giving you a stable public endpoint that forwards payloads to your local agent through a secure outbound tunnel.

The problem with self-hosted webhooks

When you run OpenClaw on a cloud VM with a public IP, webhooks just work. You give Stripe your server URL, and payloads arrive. But self-hosted setups are different:

• Home networks sit behind NAT routers that block inbound connections by default.
• Corporate firewalls restrict which ports can receive external traffic.
• Dynamic IPs change without warning, breaking hardcoded webhook URLs.
• ngrok tunnels are the go-to fix, but free-tier URLs change on restart, sessions expire, and you have no visibility into delivery failures.

The result: missed webhooks, broken automations, and agents that silently stop receiving the events they depend on.

How a webhook relay works

A relay flips the connection model. Instead of external services connecting inbound to your agent, your agent connects outbound to the relay:

1. A lightweight relay client runs alongside your OpenClaw agent. 2. The client opens a persistent, encrypted outbound connection to the relay server. 3. The relay server provides a stable public URL (e.g., wh.clawpulsar.com/abc123). 4. External services send webhooks to the relay URL. 5. The relay forwards payloads through the existing outbound tunnel to your agent.

Because the connection is outbound, no port forwarding or firewall rules are needed. The tunnel auto-reconnects if dropped. The relay URL never changes.

Setting up with ClawPulsar

ClawPulsar provides a managed relay with built-in monitoring. Here is the setup process:

Step 1: Install the relay client

The relay client is a single binary that runs alongside your OpenClaw instance. It establishes the outbound tunnel and handles reconnection automatically.

Step 2: Register your webhook endpoints

Each service gets its own relay URL. Register endpoints for Stripe, GitHub, Sentry, or any other webhook provider. Each endpoint can have custom headers, authentication, and retry policies.

Step 3: Point your services to the relay

Replace your old webhook URLs with the ClawPulsar relay URLs. For Stripe, update the endpoint in your Dashboard settings. For GitHub, update the webhook URL in your repository settings. For Sentry, update the webhook URL in your integration settings.

Step 4: Verify delivery

The ClawPulsar dashboard shows every webhook received, its delivery status, response time, and any errors. You can replay failed deliveries with one click.

Monitoring and reliability

A relay is only useful if it is reliable. ClawPulsar adds several layers on top of basic forwarding:

• Delivery confirmation: Every payload is tracked from receipt to delivery. Failed deliveries are automatically retried with exponential backoff.
• Uptime monitoring: External health checks every minute detect when your agent goes offline — even if your entire server is down.
• Budget alerts: Connect your LLM API keys and set spend thresholds. Get warnings before a runaway agent racks up a surprise bill.
• Health dashboard: Centralized view of relay throughput, delivery rates, response times, and agent uptime across all your instances.

Common webhook providers

ClawPulsar works with any service that sends webhooks. The most common for OpenClaw users:

• Stripe: Payment events, subscription changes, disputes, invoices.
• GitHub: Pull requests, issues, deployments, releases, pushes.
• Sentry: Error events, issue state changes, deployment notifications.
• Linear: Issue updates, cycle events, project changes.
• Shopify: Orders, inventory, customer events, fulfillment.

Best practices

• Use separate relay endpoints per service: This gives you independent monitoring, retry policies, and the ability to disable one without affecting others.
• Enable delivery confirmation: Always verify that your agent acknowledged the payload. Silent failures are the hardest to debug.
• Set up uptime alerts: External monitoring catches problems that self-hosted dashboards cannot — because self-hosted monitors fail when the server they monitor fails.
• Review relay logs weekly: Patterns in delivery times, error rates, and payload sizes help you spot issues before they become outages.

What is next?

ClawPulsar is currently in private beta. Join the waitlist to get early access to the managed webhook relay, uptime monitoring, and budget alerts for your self-hosted OpenClaw agent.