Webhook works on local but not on production

Hi ​@ron 

Webhook Handler Works Locally but Fails Silently in Production? Check for Async Violations

I recently ran into an issue where a webhook handler worked flawlessly in my local environment, but silently failed in production — no logs, no exceptions, no status codes other than a silent timeout.

After some digging, the root cause was simple — but easy to overlook:
A synchronous method call inside an async handler.

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❌ Problem Code

Here's the relevant piece of code I had inside the `IWebhookHandler.HandleAsync` method:

var res = SaveRequestResult(result); // ⚠ Sync call inside async method

Even though the method `SaveRequestResult()` didn’t do anything obviously blocking, calling it like this violated async execution flow, which seems to be tolerated locally but not in production (due to hosting environment or synchronization context).

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✅ Fixed Version

The fix was straightforward — wrap the call in `Task.Run(...)` and `await` it:

var res = await Task.Run(() => SaveRequestResult(result));

After this change, the webhook started working reliably in production.

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🧠 Key Takeaway

Even internal method calls inside an async handler must not block. If you're not using `await`, you're probably doing it wrong. Treat your webhook handler as fully async, including all operations inside it — especially if it's processing IO, parsing payloads, or writing data.

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💬 Real-World Example

public async Task HandleAsync(WebhookContext context, CancellationToken cancellation)
{
    var requestUri = new WWWebhookContentHelper(context).GetRequestUri();

    using (var scope = GetAdminScope())
    {
        if (_authenticator == null || !_authenticator.Authenticate(requestUri))
        {
            context.Response.StatusCode = StatusCodes.Status401Unauthorized;
            return;
        }

        using (var result = new JsonTextReader(context.Request.CreateTextReader()))
        {
            // ✅ Async-safe method call
            var res = await Task.Run(() => SaveRequestResult(result));
            context.Response.StatusCode = res
                ? StatusCodes.Status202Accepted
                : StatusCodes.Status406NotAcceptable;
        }
    }
}

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Hope this helps you avoid hours of silent debugging.