Recipes

Handler recipes

Five copy-paste recipes for receiving Cortex-dispatched triggers, signed and verified. All five sit behind the same trigger dispatch contract; pick the runtime you're already using.

Trigger.dev Ships Jul 20, 2026

Durable execution + automatic retries on the customer side. The persona-fit pick for TypeScript-first teams.

Best for: TS teams wanting checkpoint-resume + retry budget for free.

n8n Ships Jul 20, 2026

Self-hosted or n8n Cloud. Visual workflow editor with HTTP Webhook + Function nodes. Apache 2.0.

Best for: Teams that want a no-code/low-code workflow runtime they can host themselves.

Zapier Ships Jul 20, 2026

Catch Hook trigger + Code (JavaScript) step for signature verification. Broadest connector reach.

Best for: Reach over depth — when you want to feed triggers into one of Zapier’s 7000 app integrations.

Custom webhook Ships Jul 20, 2026

Your own Express / Hono / FastAPI endpoint + @cortex/sdk-ts. Production-grade option.

Best for: Teams that already run a server and want full control over execution.

MCP-executor V1.1 preview

Cortex dispatches as MCP tool call into your MCP server. ADR-0019 Tier 2. Documented now; ships V1.1.

Best for: Teams already exposing internal capabilities via MCP and wanting Cortex as a client.

What every recipe covers

  1. Register a handler via handler.register (one call, returns a webhook_secret).
  2. Verify the signature on every inbound POST using the canonical timestamp + "." + body string. 5-minute replay window. Reject stale or mismatched signatures with 401.
  3. Execute the action through whatever channel the recipe's runtime exposes (Slack node, email step, custom function, etc).
  4. Call back trigger.complete (or trigger.reverse) with the outcome and your external reference id.
  5. Handle retries — Cortex dedupes via X-Cortex-Idempotency-Key. Your handler must too.

Cross-cutting references