Webhooks (HTTP callbacks): Connection Overrides
Twilio uses HTTP callbacks (webhooks) to let your application know when events happen, such as receiving an SMS message or getting an incoming phone call. When the event occurs, Twilio makes an HTTP request (usually a POST or a GET) to the URL you configured for the webhook. Twilio's request will include details of the event such as the incoming phone number or the body of an incoming message.
Twilio’s use of HTTP URLs conforms to the standard syntax of a generic URI/URL.
Connection overrides
Twilio has implemented URL extensions, that can be added to the standard HTTP webhook URL. These extensions give you the ability to override Twilio's default HTTP callbacks connection settings on a per request basis. The override settings allow you to specify:
- Longer timeouts to better support intermittent network issues between Twilio and your server/application
- Shorter timeouts to speed up failover (to fallback URL) in the case of an outage on your server/application
- HTTP callback connection retries on failures/timeouts
- The egress Twilio Edge for your HTTP callback
- The total timeout limit for all of the retries to complete
- The use of Server Name Indication (SNI) if your server/application requires SNI to ensure a proper TLS handshake for all attempts
Connection overrides will be passed on a per webhook URL basis in the form of "fragments". These fragments will contain key-value pairs; key and value are separated by =, pairs are separated by &. The 1st key-value pair start with #.
The complete list of overrides supported are detailed below:
|
Parameter |
Valid values |
Default |
Notes |
|
Connect Timeout |
Min: 100 Max: 10000 |
5000 |
The timeout in milliseconds Twilio will wait to establish its TCP connection to your webserver. |
|
Read Timeout |
Min: 100 Max: 15000 |
15000 |
The amount of time in milliseconds after sending your webhook an HTTP request that Twilio will wait for the initial HTTP response packet. Also applies to the amount of time Twilio will wait between individual packets within your HTTP response. |
|
Total time |
Min: 100 Max: 15000 |
15000 |
The total time allowed for all timeouts including retries. If not set, the maximum limit is enforced. |
|
Retry count |
Min: 0 Max: 5 |
1 |
The number of retry attempts Twilio will make if its connection to your webhook fails. To make sure you capture the behaviours you need, make sure to set the Retry Policy( rp ) value below accordingly |
|
Retry policy |
|
|
The type of failure to retry on:
Pass as a list of values, e.g., |
|
SNI |
|
y |
If set to Note Only applies for secure connections (HTTPS) |
|
Edge Location |
|
|
The Twilio edge location where webhooks egress. This can be a list and we rotate through the list as retries happen. The order of precedence for edge location: (1) Twilio Interconnect Edge if specified in |
There will be a new HTTP header (I-Twilio-Idempotency-Token), a unique string, that you can use to distinguish retry attempts.
Due to the real-time nature of voice calls, there is a hard upper timeout of 15 seconds imposed by Twilio on all call-related HTTP requests. This hard limit overrides any of the timers described above on call-processing requests, and is present to help to ensure a good end-user calling experience.
There are also other product and resource-related timers which may supercede these timers; please review your product documentation to help you determine appropriate settings for your use-case.
Examples
(1) https://example.com/foo?query=123#ct=1000
Connection timeout (time to wait for a connection to be established) of one second.
(2) https://example.com/foo?query=123#ct=1000&rt=1000
Connection timeout (time to wait for a connection to be established) of one second and a Read timeout (time to wait for data to be returned on a connection) of one second.
(3) https://example.com/foo?query=123#rt=5000&rp=ct,rt
Retry on both connect and read timeout, while also reducting the read timeout to five seconds.
(4) https://example.com/foo?query=123#e=ashburn,umatilla
Retry on failure over different edge location. First attempt goes out over Ashburn, second attempt goes out over Umatilla (Oregon).
(5) https://example.com/foo?query=123#rc=2&ct=1000
Retry on connection failure, but with a one-second connection timeout. If there is no connection in one second, retry twice, i.e., for a total of three attempts to connect.
Where are these overrides available?
Connection overrides are available on all product webhooks except for Twilio Conversations and Twilio Frontline. The overrides may be specified in webhook URLs in both the API resource properties and TwiML attributes.
If you have trouble implementing a connection override, you can reach out to our support team for help.
Need some help?
We all do sometimes; code is hard. Get help now from our support team, or lean on the wisdom of the crowd by visiting Twilio's Stack Overflow Collective or browsing the Twilio tag on Stack Overflow.
