--- title: Getting started with React Stripe.js slug: getting-started-with-react-stripe-js published_at: 2021-03-16 16:00:06 +0000 updated_at: 2023-01-30 22:53:45 +0000 summary: description: In this episode, you'll learn how we use React with Stripe Samples, a collection of GitHub repositories showing full end to end examples of Stripe integrations. We'll start from scratch and build a simple create-react-app style app with Stripe.js and React Stripe.js installed. You'll learn about the loadStripe helper, Elements and ElementsConsumer providers, and how to use the useElements and useStripe hooks for functional react based components. ### Presenter CJ Avilla - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ### Resources React Stripe.js official docs: https://stripe.com/docs/stripe-js/react Stripe.js docs: https://stripe.com/docs/stripe-js Create React App documentation: https://create-react-app.dev ### Server Starters Node.js Express Starter - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPR2aJ6XnAc Ruby Sinatra Starter - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aA9Enb8NVc Python Flask Starter - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ul1vfmsDck .NET Core Starter - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-mMOB8MhmE Java Spark Starter - https://youtu.be/qY2HBiBu2XA Go Echo Starter - https://youtu.be/ePmEVBu8w6Y ### Table of contents 00:00 Introduction 00:40 Scaffold basic file and directory structure and install react dependencies 01:48 Create and render a basic react app 03:30 Install stripe dependencies 04:25 loadStripe 05:23 Elements and ElementsConsumer providers 06:03 CardElement/IdealBankElement/CardNumberElement components 06:50 useStripe and useElements hooks ### Support If you have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team at https://support.stripe.com/ or join us on Discord https://stripe.com/go/developer-chat. ### Updates Sign up to stay updated with developer news: https://go.stripe.global/dev-digest ### Feedback If you have any feedback about this or other episodes, let us know: https://forms.gle/VjNqzRhotM2snYo88. #Stripe #Payments tags: [stripe, payments, react, react stripe, react stripe.js, stripe.js, create-react-app, stripe samples, react-dom, react-router-dom, react-scripts, @stripe/stripe-js, @stripe/react-stripe-js, how to setup react stripe, @cjav_dev] views: 19554 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/getting-started-with-react-stripe-js youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5y5WwF9s-ZI youtube_id: 5y5WwF9s-ZI embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/5y5WwF9s-ZI thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/5y5WwF9s-ZI/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Getting started with React Stripe.js *Published: March 16, 2021* *Views: 19554* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5y5WwF9s-ZI) [![Getting started with React Stripe.js](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/5y5WwF9s-ZI/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5y5WwF9s-ZI) ## Description In this episode, you'll learn how we use React with Stripe Samples, a collection of GitHub repositories showing full end to end examples of Stripe integrations. We'll start from scratch and build a simple create-react-app style app with Stripe.js and React Stripe.js installed. You'll learn about the loadStripe helper, Elements and ElementsConsumer providers, and how to use the useElements and useStripe hooks for functional react based components. ### Presenter CJ Avilla - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ### Resources React Stripe.js official docs: https://stripe.com/docs/stripe-js/react Stripe.js docs: https://stripe.com/docs/stripe-js Create React App documentation: https://create-react-app.dev ### Server Starters Node.js Express Starter - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPR2aJ6XnAc Ruby Sinatra Starter - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aA9Enb8NVc Python Flask Starter - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ul1vfmsDck .NET Core Starter - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-mMOB8MhmE Java Spark Starter - https://youtu.be/qY2HBiBu2XA Go Echo Starter - https://youtu.be/ePmEVBu8w6Y ### Table of contents 00:00 Introduction 00:40 Scaffold basic file and directory structure and install react dependencies 01:48 Create and render a basic react app 03:30 Install stripe dependencies 04:25 loadStripe 05:23 Elements and ElementsConsumer providers 06:03 CardElement/IdealBankElement/CardNumberElement components 06:50 useStripe and useElements hooks ### Support If you have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team at https://support.stripe.com/ or join us on Discord https://stripe.com/go/developer-chat. ### Updates Sign up to stay updated with developer news: https://go.stripe.global/dev-digest ### Feedback If you have any feedback about this or other episodes, let us know: https://forms.gle/VjNqzRhotM2snYo88. #Stripe #Payments ## Transcript [Music] in this episode we cover foundational topics for working with react-based stripe samples so most stripe samples include a react front end created from create react app and if you already have a react app set up and react stripe js up and running feel free to skip this episode and check out another video in the stripe developer channel to learn how to integrate a specific stripe product so nearly all stripe integrations require some sort of server implementation we're not going to cover how to configure the server today however you can take a look at any of the playlists for client libraries like stripe node stripe php or go to see how to implement a back end we will touch briefly on how to proxy requests from your react app to a server so we're going to start from scratch today and create a client directory we'll also ensure that there is a public and a source directory inside there and we're going to just run npm init to create a new package.json then we'll install dependencies we're going to pull in four react libraries for building and working with react notice that react scripts is a tool from create react app that has some handy features so let's update package.json and make some quick tweaks so we're going to rename this to accept a payment we're going to remove main and then add a script for starting the app with react scripts and finally add a proxy that'll allow us to make ajax calls and have those proxied by a different server than the one serving up the react app so for stripe samples the proxy will be a backend server likely running node.js or something like this so in order to run our react app we need an index.html and an index.js as our entry point let's create the html file first we'll keep it super minimal nothing fancy here it's going to be a single div where the react app will be loaded then we'll create an index.js file in the source directory here's where we'll load react and react dom and render the app into that root element in our html we can run our app with npm start which is going to open our browser to localhost 3000 and just display our simple hello world so it's conventional to create a component called app which is the parent for the application so we're going to create a new basic function component for our app and in some cases we will use react router dom to render a specific component based on the path of the browser so we use the browser router and route for rendering these specific pages so in app we're going to import browser router as switch and we'll import route from react router dom and when the root route is matched we'll just render an h1 and in the context of stripe this is often some payment page so let's create another component called payment form and render that when we hit the root route the browser is now rendering our payment form component so that's pretty cool one other bit we want to add is wrapping our component in the with router helper from react router dom we do this so that payment form can redirect and it also has access to this.props.history okay so at this point we've got a working react app and we can use all of our favorite react tools let's take the next step and set up stripe so from the terminal let's install the stripe libraries stripe.js is the foundational javascript library for building payment flows the primary integration path through stripe.js is with stripe elements which allows you to collect sensitive payment info using customizable ui components stripe js also provides a single interface for things like apple pay google pay the payment request api and has some tools for redirecting to the stripe hosted checkout page react stripe.js is a thin wrapper around stripe elements it allows you to add elements to any react app using these just components so if you're building an integration with stripe checkout rather than a custom payment form you really only need stripe js as there aren't any elements involved with the checkout integration one last thing to show here in the terminal is that our server has an endpoint called slash config that responds with the publishable api key so in a vanilla js application without react users typically load stripe.js with a script tag in the body of the html or the head of their html the npm package for stripe js exposes a helper function called load stripe that loads the script tag for you and initializes a stripe object asynchronously it accepts a publishable key and returns a promise so technically you could hard code this string value but will generally fetch the publishable key from the server here we're seeing an error because we used a weight outside of an async function so to fix that i'll wrap this bootstrapping code here in an async immediately evoked function expression or an async iffy one other thing to think about regarding performance is you want to avoid calling load stripe inside the render method of a component all right so react stripe js has two providers for passing that stripe context down to nested components or down to children one is the elements provider and it's used with react hooks the other is the elements consumer and that's for working with class-based components we're going to be building function components and using hooks today so we're going to use the elements provider and you'll want to wrap any children that might use stripe elements for convenience we usually just add the elements provider or the elements wrapper around the entire app and we're going to pass down that stripe prop and now this can either be an instance of stripe or a promise that will resolve with an instance of stripe now we can use the element components inside of our app or any of app's children in this case like payment form so let's take a look so if we jump into paymentformjs here i'll import the card element from react stripe.js and we'll just drop that on the page this is the single line card element for collecting the card number expiration cvc and postal code technically if you want full control you can also separate out the card number element you can even use things like the ideal bank component to render a list of supported banks with the ideal payment method type okay so we're going to switch back to the card element and in most cases these controls are rendered inside of a form so we'll add a little form here and an onsubmit handler and inside of the submit handler will often do things like making an ajax call to create a payment intent or a checkout session and then working with the stripe object to redirect to checkout or to confirm the payment intent so next i want to cover two hooks that are really helpful when building with react stripe.js one is called use elements and it's handy for locating and accessing mounted elements on the page the elements object it returns has a get element method that takes the type of element to locate and it returns a reference to one of those so we're just going to console log here and see what it looks like in the browser and you can see that it's it's highlighting that card input so that's great the second hook i wanted to cover is use stripe which returns a reference to the stripe instance that was passed down into the elements provider you'll use the stripe instance for interacting with the stripe api from the client to like tokenize payment methods or for redirecting to checkout for example now it's possible that stripe or elements is not like completely loaded when the form is submitted so we always need to check if stripe and elements both exist and return with a no op if they are undefined so you can customize and style react stripe elements we have a full reference of the configurable styles in the stripe docs i'm not going to cover that today but just for reference you can head over to the docs to look at all the things you can customize so as a quick recap we created a new react app from scratch and installed a bunch of dependencies we saw how to set up stripe js with load stripe and then render a react app and use the elements or the elements consumer providers for enabling children to use react stripe.js components we briefly touched on switch and route and how they're used in samples and we talked about the use elements and used stripe hooks and we saw a few different element components so yeah at this point i would recommend taking a look at the next episode in this playlist to learn how to implement a specific stripe integration with your new react stripe.js knowledge thank you again so much for joining us if this video was helpful please consider liking the video as that will help others find the same content and if you'd like to see more episodes like this in the future hit subscribe and stay tuned otherwise we'll see in the next one --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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