In the end (its been a long weekend of experimentation) the problem is that aiohttp requires a loop to work right which is problematic because rasa is already running a uvloop that doesn’t allow nesting. Otherwise it needs to do an await which blocks or create a task (fire and forget) which does the HTTP request in the background but generates an error because the result is not retrieved and screws up the next action so required a dummy action to clear the error. I’ll write a longer forum post for people trying to do this later, but essentially I resorted to using multiprocessing which did the request in the background, but didn’t generate an error. So using this works perfect in Rasa X local (though I can’t get it to work in rasa x using docker compose, if you had advice I’ve got another forum post http://forum.rasa.com/t/rasa-x-docker-compose-install-external-events-error/42113