How to create Discourse posts automatically from Nolt webhook data?

Development

AI-generated summary

In a Dev-category discussion titled “How to create Discourse posts automatically from Nolt webhook data?”, ramyzhang asks how to automatically post Nolt feedback to a Discourse thread via webhooks. Falco suggests using Zapier, serverless services, or a Heroku bot to receive Nolt webhooks, process data, and POST to Discourse’s API, linking to the createTopicPostPM docs. ramyzhang appreciates the docs and asks for serverless service recommendations, noting frustration with Zapier. pfaffman proposes an alternative: installing a Discourse plugin to handle Nolt webhooks directly, avoiding external services. ramyzhang agrees, preferring to keep things within Discourse. pfaffman offers help via Marketplace or points to GitHub’s all-the-plugins repo for examples of plugins adding custom routes. The discussion centers on integrating Nolt feedback into Discourse via API or plugin, with emphasis on self-hosted setups and minimizing external dependencies.

1

Hello! First time poster, please notify me if I’m breaking any convention in my question :grin:

My team is currently using Nolt for our product’s user feedback and feature requests. We would like to create a thread on our Discourse community where, whenever new feedback is posted on our Nolt board, it automatically writes a new comment on that thread as well.

Currently, Nolt has a webhooks feature that I think we could use to make this happen, but I’m not sure where to go from there. Am I meant to POST that data to the Discourse API via a bot hosted on Heroku, for example? I’d like to know if there are any core resources to building something like this because I’m lost as to where to start.

Our Discourse community is self-hosted, if that helps.

2

You will need something to receive the Nolt webhook, massage the data, and execute a Discourse API call.

A lot of people use Zapier and similar tool for doing that, but you can also use a serverless service, or a bot on Heroku as you said.

The docs on creating new posts on Discourse via API calls live at Discourse API Docs

3

I did check out Zapier and was considering it as an option, I do find troubleshooting to be really frustrating with it sometimes though. Do you by any chance have any specific recommendations for the serverless services you mentioned? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of any.

The link to the API Docs is very helpful! I was looking for it.

Thanks for the response :grin:

4

The other solution if you can install plugins, is a plugin that will accept the webhook calls from nolt directly. It’s probably not much harder to do and won’t have to have another service involved.

5

I think we’re able to. That sounds like a great option - would love to keep things within Discourse :stuck_out_tongue: Thanks for the info!

6

If you need help and have a budget, you can contact me or ask in Marketplace. If you’re looking for examples, what I recommend is getting the all-the-plugins repo from github/discourse and find one that adds a route.