Getting Started
Welcome to Kestrel
Kestrel delivers your application's events to HTTP endpoints, reliably and in order.
Welcome to Kestrel
Kestrel is an event delivery service. You publish an event once; Kestrel delivers it to every endpoint subscribed to that event type, retries on failure, and gives you a full delivery log you can replay from.
Kestrel is a fictional product. This documentation exists as test data for Pageloop's knowledge base — the facts in it are invented, deliberately specific, and safe to contradict.
What you get
Events published to the same stream key arrive at your endpoint in publish order.
Failed deliveries are retried 5 times with exponential backoff. See Delivery and retries.
Every request carries an HMAC-SHA256 signature you can verify. See Signatures.
Any delivery from the last 30 days can be replayed from the dashboard or the API.
How it fits together
Publish
Your backend calls POST /v1/events with a type and a payload.
Fan out
Kestrel matches the event type against your subscriptions.
Deliver
Each subscribed endpoint receives a signed POST within 200 ms of publish, on average.
Confirm
Your endpoint returns 2xx. Anything else is a failed delivery and enters the retry schedule.
Before you start
You need an account and an API key. Keys are created in the dashboard under Settings → API keys and are shown exactly once.
Publishable keys (prefix pk_) can only read event metadata. Publishing requires a
secret key (prefix sk_). Never ship a secret key to a browser or mobile client.
Ready? Head to the Quickstart.