Question from Reddit user:
Hey folks,
I was hoping this little project would’ve turned into a pearl by now, but no such luck.Thanks to a few helpful people here, I finally got a working prototype of my app running.
The current issue: I’m trying to pull data from Go High Level (GHL) using webhooks, but I’m stuck.
I can successfully connect and get a POST response from the server—but the response looks like this:
webhook response: “\n\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n \n”It’s basically just blank.
After three hours of debugging, I’ve at least stopped Replit from looping endlessly, but I’m totally out of ideas now.
This integration is crucial—there will be a lot of data exchanged between these platforms, and I want it to be flawless.
Has anyone dealt with this before, or have any idea what I might be missing?
Thanks in advance!
Answer from Nabil:
The short answer is:
Your webhook response, which looks like an HTML or XML wrapper with only whitespace inside, is almost certainly the result of your Replit application failing to correctly parse the POST request’s JSON body, or it’s an unexpected response from Go High Level (GHL) that you are mistakenly logging as the inbound data.
The crucial first step for debugging is to use a free, third-party webhook testing service like webhook.site or RequestBin as an intermediary endpoint.
Point your GHL webhook to this service first to confirm that GHL is actually sending the contact data in the request body as expected.
If the data shows up there, the problem lies in your Replit code’s inability to read the payload, likely due to a missing or improperly configured JSON body parser in your web framework (e.g., in Node.js, you need middleware like body-parser or express.json()).
The long answer is:
The blank response you’re seeing in your Replit logs – webhook response: "\n\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n \n \n" – strongly suggests two main areas for troubleshooting.
First, you must isolate whether GHL is failing to send the data or if your Replit code is failing to receive and process it.
As mentioned, use a temporary external webhook tester.
If the contact data (name, email, custom fields, etc.) shows up there as a valid JSON payload, you can eliminate GHL as the problem.
The issue is then definitively on your Replit end.
Since GHL webhooks typically send data as a JSON body, your server framework needs to be explicitly told to parse this body before your route handler attempts to access it.
If you’re using a Node.js framework like Express, you absolutely must include the appropriate body parsing middleware, such as app.use(express.json());, otherwise, the request body will remain empty or unreadable, resulting in the blank output you are seeing.
If you’re using another language or framework, find the equivalent function that parses an incoming application/json content type.
For a truly flawless and scalable integration that needs to exchange a lot of data, relying solely on unidirectional webhooks can become a maintenance challenge.
A more robust, enterprise-grade solution involves leveraging the official HighLevel API for both sending and retrieving complex, custom data.
You can house this logic in your Replit application and potentially utilize advanced features like Replit’s code execution API or Replit’s GraphQL API for better performance and to abstract the backend logic from the frontend.
For a data-heavy application, this method is more reliable than solely depending on webhooks which can occasionally fail or have payload limits.
To enhance data tracking reliability and avoid future discrepancies, you can also use Google Tag Manager and a server-side tagging environment like Stape or Google Cloud Platform to unify and clean up all the inbound user data before it even hits GHL, which simplifies the data you ultimately need to exchange between GHL and your Replit app, making your integration far more reliable.
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