--- title: Making requests with stripe-php slug: making-requests-with-stripe-php published_at: 2020-12-28 08:00:02 +0000 updated_at: 2023-01-30 22:54:01 +0000 summary: description: Learn how to make requests to the Stripe API using the stripe-php client library. You'll see how to format parameters and pass request body, query string params, and request headers. ### Presenter CJ Avilla - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ### Resources Official client library: https://github.com/stripe/stripe-php Code: https://github.com/stripe-samples/developer-office-hours/blob/master/2020-10-30-client-libraries/php/demo_requests.php ## Table of contents 00:00 Overview 01:16 API reference 04:10 Create an object passing no params 05:12 Retrieve single object 06:19 Create an object with scalar values 08:25 Create an object with enum values 10:50 Create an object with nested associative array 12:32 Create an object with a list of strings 14:01 Update an object with scalar values 15:24 Update an object with a list of nested associative arrays 17:30 Retrieve a list of objects 18:30 Retrieve a list filtered by scalar 20:15 Delete an object 20:52 Custom methods overview 21:50 Custom method demo 24:26 Nested service method overview 24:57 Nested service method demo 26:55 Request headers overview 28:00 Request headers demo 30:10 Conclusion ### Support If you have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team on Discord at https://stripe.com/go/developer-chat. ### Feedback If you have any feedback about this or other episodes, let us know: https://forms.gle/VjNqzRhotM2snYo88. #Stripe #Payments tags: [stripe, payments, php, stripe-php, client libraries, api, @cjav_dev] views: 6353 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/making-requests-with-stripe-php youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fc75MwzT4MI youtube_id: Fc75MwzT4MI embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/Fc75MwzT4MI thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Fc75MwzT4MI/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Making requests with stripe-php *Published: December 28, 2020* *Views: 6353* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fc75MwzT4MI) [![Making requests with stripe-php](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Fc75MwzT4MI/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fc75MwzT4MI) ## Description Learn how to make requests to the Stripe API using the stripe-php client library. You'll see how to format parameters and pass request body, query string params, and request headers. ### Presenter CJ Avilla - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ### Resources Official client library: https://github.com/stripe/stripe-php Code: https://github.com/stripe-samples/developer-office-hours/blob/master/2020-10-30-client-libraries/php/demo_requests.php ## Table of contents 00:00 Overview 01:16 API reference 04:10 Create an object passing no params 05:12 Retrieve single object 06:19 Create an object with scalar values 08:25 Create an object with enum values 10:50 Create an object with nested associative array 12:32 Create an object with a list of strings 14:01 Update an object with scalar values 15:24 Update an object with a list of nested associative arrays 17:30 Retrieve a list of objects 18:30 Retrieve a list filtered by scalar 20:15 Delete an object 20:52 Custom methods overview 21:50 Custom method demo 24:26 Nested service method overview 24:57 Nested service method demo 26:55 Request headers overview 28:00 Request headers demo 30:10 Conclusion ### Support If you have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team on Discord at https://stripe.com/go/developer-chat. ### Feedback If you have any feedback about this or other episodes, let us know: https://forms.gle/VjNqzRhotM2snYo88. #Stripe #Payments ## Transcript the stripe api is organized around standard restful conventions it uses those standard http requests and responses with predictable resource oriented urls request bodies are form encoded and responses are json encoded http requests you make can send data to stripe servers in one of three parts of the request in the request body this is where you pass parameters to create update and take specific actions on objects so for instance if you're creating a customer the customer's email address might be something that you pass in the body of a post request http headers which is where the configuration like api key and api version are sent you know in our docs will often refer to the arguments as request params there's also query string params most often used for filtering lists with get requests in this video you'll learn how to format request parameters so that you can effectively work from the api reference to make most requests and build almost any supported stripe integration the api reference is the detailed documentation about each resource cataloging the supported parameters some sample requests and responses generally when building an integration you'll follow an official guide but may need some specialized params to solve for your specific use case on the left you'll find a list of resources expanding customers shows which api endpoints are available for working with customers under the customer resource we see the customer object and methods for creating retrieving updating deleting and listing customers the customer object describes the shape and attributes of an instance of a customer that's returned in the responses from the stripe api you'll notice that some attributes are marked with the expand label we'll cover the expand feature of the api and how to work with it from client libraries in more detail in another episode however i just want to show that this is how from the api reference you can tell which attributes are expandable the create a customer api endpoint describes the parameters sent to the stripe api when creating a customer on the far right side we see a code snippet example with some basic params note that you can switch from curl to the stripe cli or any of our officially supported client libraries to see a basic code snippet in the programming language you're most familiar with in the next section of the api reference we'll see details about making a request to create a customer these are the parameters that can be sent in the post body to the stripe api to create customer objects the most common parameters are listed at the top and then additional or more advanced parameters are included below under the more parameters subheading if your account's default api version is older than the latest version then you might also see a panel with information about breaking changes released in a newer api version note that all parameters for creating a customer here are optional if we look at the create a payment intent reference you'll see a label showing that the amount and currency parameters are required in some cases parameters might be conditionally required as is true for off session the values for these parameters or the arguments can be scalar values associative arrays arrays of associative arrays or arrays of strings so the sub associative arrays or child parameters can also be deeply nested as is the case with shipping address some params might be enums like tax exempt which accepts the values none exempt or reverse in this episode we'll cover how to construct the arguments passed to the client library so that you're confident in passing scalar values or more complex nested associative arrays right so i've created a file called demo requests.php with stripe php installed via composer and imported and i've got my api key set so let's start with a very simple request to create a customer so i'm going to say create a customer with no params and it looks something like this we're going to say customer is equal to stripe customers create and then we're just going to echo out that customer and then i'll run the code here on the left hand side and in the terminal you can see the results that were returned from stripe so in the terminal output you can see the customer object returned in the attributes that are populated for you by default now if we wanted to fetch this single customer later on we would do so by making a get request with this id um so let's do that next so we can update this and we'll make another method here called uh retrieve customer and that works something like so customer is equal to stripe customers retrieve and this just takes in the string value for the id of the customer so if we run this code again we're going to see the same json returned as we saw when we created the customer but this time we're just fetching the customer that we just created now the id of the customer in this case is going to be set in the path for the request so this is going to be something like v1 customers slash cuss underscore and then the id of the customer there's uh when we're making a retrieve call like this we're not passing anything in the request body and in this specific case we're not passing anything in the request parameters either all right so let's spice things up a bit and create another customer this time with some scalar values create a customer with scalar values stripe customers create and then we're going to pass in as its first argument an associative array with the keys email and the value jenny rosen's email and the key name and the value jenny rosen for the name of the customer and again we're just going to print this out and we'll let's actually also print out the the name and email of the customer all right so we're going to run this you'll see at the very bottom we get jenny rosen and we get the jennyrosen.example.com so this is being printed out and we are able to um pass in some scalar values to create a customer and we can access those in the customer object that is returned again the stripe api expects parameters to be passed as form and coded data in the post body not as json so the response that comes back from the stripe api is json but the request is form encoded so this is what the post body would look like in this case we would have you know a email equal to jenny.rosen at example.com and then in ampersand separating the email key value pair from the name key value pair we'd have jenny and then maybe percent 20 rosen so this is what the the url or the form encoded post body the string would look like when you're working with the stripe php client library it's going to abstract this away so you don't have to think about it but it's something to keep in mind if you're going to attempt to make some requests outside of the context of straight php so yeah keep that in mind if you're going to manually start to implement requests okay next i want to talk about enums so some scalar some scalars accept specific enum values so the tax exempt parameter on customer accepts one of none exempt or reversed so let's say we're going to create a customer with an enum and here we're going to say customer is equal to again stripe customers create with this associative array and this time we're going to pass tax exempt and we'll pass one of the valid values reverse and then we're going to say echo dollar customer and then we can execute this so that created a brand new customer with its tax exempt value set to reverse we could set this to none and then run the code again and we would see that the tax exempt is set to none these are both valid evening values if we were to pass an invalid value for the enum then you'll see that we get a 400 http status code in the response and the error message is going to tell us that we've passed an invalid value for tax exempt it must be one of none reverse or exempt so it's going to tell us when when we're using a value for the enum that is invalid let's also just show like what it would look like to create a customer uh with an invalid parameter so if we just grab these if i tried to pass in um email underscore address recall that the the actual parameter is actually just email but if we pass an email underscore address and attempt to create a customer this way then when we execute this code we're again going to get a 400 error but this time the error message says received unknown parameter and then the name of the parameter email address so it's telling us that this parameter is invalid most common reason for this is just not typing the name of the parameter correctly so you want to check the spelling for your parameter name but it's also possible that your api version the name of the parameter changed in your api version so a couple things to check out there all right so let's up the stakes yet again and send some nested data inside of one of these child parameters with nested associative array um so here we're going to say something like the customer is equal to a a new customer and this time we're going to pass a scalar value at the top level so this is going to be pm card visa and i'll talk about that in a second and then we're also going to pass invoice settings which itself is not a scalar but it is a another associative array so this is a nested or child parameter so default payment method here is a pm card visa okay if we echo that customer invoice settings you can see what i'm talking about all right so that now we've got we've got back uh this sub object or this nested object called invoice settings and it has custom fields default payment method and then a footer so pm card visa is one of the test payment method ids if we pass this at the top level in payment method and also inside of invoice settings p default payment method then our resulting test customer can successfully make recurring payments uh in test mode again for billing subscription or for other invoices so this is how we can create a test customer without without needing to do any tokenization and also demonstrating you know just how to pass some nested some nested data here next i wanted to show you how we can pass in a list of strings so in the case of a customer it supports a parameter called preferred locales so we're going to say create customer with list of strings and here we'll say the customer is equal to stripe customers create the parameter is called preferred locales and it takes a list of strings so maybe this customer speaks both english and spanish i wish that i could speak spanish so we're going to print back out that customer let's also print their preferred locales okay let's see oh all right so this didn't this did not get converted to a string so let's uh preferred locales let's grab the first one and the second one all right so we see en and es they're they're combined here at the bottom and we also see that the preferred locales for this customer have been set to english and spanish so that's how we can pass a list of strings to the stripe api so now that we've created several customers let's see how we can update an existing customer so the concepts from earlier are going to apply however we'll also need to pass the id of the object we want to update so all objects in the stripe api have this string id a customer is going to start with cus underscore and when updating the customer we're going to pass that as the first argument to the update method so here we might say customer is equal to you know stripe customers update so this is going to be the first argument and then the second argument is an associative array with all of our parameters to update the customer so let's update the customer's email address for this customer and we'll just set it to jr example.com all right so let's print out this customer's id and their email address okay so if we run this we see that we printed out the id of the customer and then their email address had a just a space in here and the next thing that we want to do is show that if i change this to jr2 we are going to update that customer the id did not change but now their email address is set to jr2 so that's how you can update a customer with just some simple params we can also follow this same pattern for updating a customer and passing these nested associative arrays so let's now update a customer with nested params so we can say the same same sort of thing so customer is equal to stripe customers update and we want to pass in again the id of the customer and this time we want to pass in um invoice settings and we saw an example earlier with invoice settings where we set the default payment method there's another uh parameter we can pass as part of invoice settings called custom fields and in this case it is an array of associative arrays so here we have two sets of square brackets we have the outer square brackets that says this is going to be a list of sort of objects and then the inner square bracket is the associative array that represents the key value pairs so custom field objects support a name and a common use case is to pass in a tax id here so we might say the name is vat and the value is three abc let's move this up and so that is going to create a brand new or it's going to update this customer it's going to pass in this nested list of associative arrays so now we can echo out uh customer invoice settings and you'll see what i'm talking about so here the stripe object for invoice settings will show you the json when we print it out including the custom fields here which is again a list of these sub-objects which now have a name and value for that and the id the tax id there while talking about tax ids there is now official support in the api for account tax ids so if you're interested in that go check out merchant tax ids okay we can also make a get request to fetch a page from the list of customers with the all method let's do that here so we're going to say fetch a list of customers and it looks like this customers is equal to stripe customers all and then we're going to echo customers we can also just say like maybe we say for each customer's data so data is actually going to be the array or the list of customer objects as cuss and we can just echo maybe we echo out the id of the customer and um let's put a new line okay we're running and you'll see at the bottom here that we have the list of all the ids of all the different customers by default this endpoint is going to return 10 objects max for the page stripe.php also supports autopagination which is a handy tool for working with lists so we have another episode about pagination and we show how to use these list endpoints in more detail showing the limit ending before and starting after parameters all these are covered in the pagination episode so go check that out the customer list endpoint turns out that it can also be used to filter a list of customers by email address so i'm just going to grab this comment this out and say we're going to fetch a list of customers filtered by email and here i can pass in an associative array with email as one of the top level arguments jenny.rosenat example.com and this will make a get request to fetch customers and only those customers with that email address so to show this while we're printing out the id of the customer we'll also print out actually yeah let's say we have the customer id and then that's going to be with a space and then we'll print the customers email okay so if we run this we should see yeah you'll see all the customer ids and the email addresses so a customer object in stripe is not uniquely identifiable by their email address every you can reuse the same email address across multiple customers in your stripe account so here we see ids for several different customers and then the email address that we have filtered by so now we're just pulling a list of customers filtered by email and in this case the email the email value here the key and value are passed in the query string parameters for the get request to the list endpoint for customers so occasionally you may want to delete an object delete expects the id of the object to be deleted so let's delete one of these customers we've created so we're going to say stripe customers delete and we're going to pass in the id of the customer and we'll just print that out so this is how you delete a customer if we run this you'll see that the object was deleted if we pull up the documentation for the payment intent resource you'll see that there are some additional api methods on the left in addition to the standard crud operations some resources support additional actions also known as custom methods in the case of a payment intent you'll see the confirm capture and cancel methods these work similar to update api calls but use a special api path and perform a specific action on an underlying object when we veer away from the standard create retrieve update delete and list operations the custom method names follow a verb naming convention so for instance we have dispute.close paymentintent.confirm charge.capture etc the client library will expose access to custom methods in a predictable way using a name that matches the verb seen in the api reference next up i want to talk about custom methods and to demonstrate let's create and then confirm a payment intent so we're first going to create a payment intent with just the amount and id say intent is equal to stripe payment intense create and we want to pass in an amount ten dollars and the currency is usd so this will create a brand new payment intent we want to echo out its id let's also echo out its uh status okay so we'll run this code and we get back a payment intent and its status is requires payment method so this is how we create a payment intent and by default payment intents are not confirmed automatically so then the next step is to confirm the payment intent so we're next we're going to pass that id into the custom confirm method to uh with a test payment method to confirm this so now we can say something like intent is equal to stripe payment intense confirm and now we want to pass in the id of the payment intent that we want to confirm as the first argument and then the second argument are any other any parameters that are related to this action that we're taking so we need to pass in a payment method and we can use that pm card visa that we talked about earlier that test payment method and then down below again we'll just echo out um the id and the status of this payment intent so we're going to run this and you'll see that the status is now succeeded again we have the same payment intent id um so the custom method here is called confirm when we veer from the standard crud operations like create read update delete the method in stripe.php will be a predictable a predictable method name that matches the name of the verb in the api reference for the action that we're taking on that given object so in the case of confirm or capture or close for a dispute those are all going to be just the name of the verb is the method that's in the client library that you can call some api endpoints are nested under higher level resources so for example when working with a list of lines for an invoice those are accessible through a path which includes the id of the invoice like so sometimes accessing these nested resources requires first fetching an instance of the parent resource in this case an invoice and then second making an api call to list its lines let's take a look next let's talk about nested service methods so on an invoice object an invoice has line items and if you wanted to retrieve those line items you could do so through this nested service methods we can say lines is equal to stripe invoices all lines and then the first argument is the the id of the parent resource so in this case it's going to be an invoice id and then the second argument are the list parameters for filtering this line list of lines so this is this is a list endpoint that is nested under a parent resource so we can pass the standard list parameters here so we might say limit limit five and then echo lines so i'm going to grab an invoice id with the stripe cli stripe invoices list limit 1 pipe to jq dot okay so this should give me an invoice id that we can use okay so i'm going to grab that id enter it here and now when we run our code we should see yeah so we should we see the the invoice line items that are related to this invoice so this is how we can make requests to a nested service method now technically under the hood this is making a request to v1 invoices in xxx like the id of the parent resources slash lines and because of this query string parameter here we're passing in limit equals five so that's kind of what this looks like is we have a bit that is the query string param we have the by saying all lines we know that we're doing a list method for the lines which are nested under this parent resource so that is how we access a a nested service method okay thus far our examples have passed data into the client library methods and the client library has form encoded and sent those values to the stripe api either as part of the request body or in the query string params let's turn to passing configuration options in the request headers headers are most commonly used for authentication versioning and stripe connect you'll want to refer to the authentication episode to learn about how api keys are passed or to the versioning episode about how to specify the api version in the headers either globally or per request so the particular use case i want to cover briefly here is for stripe connect connect enables you to build a platform to facilitate payments for other sellers or vendors users connect their stripe account to your stripe account and then you can make api calls on their behalf once connected this works by passing the id of the connected account in the http headers let's take a look at how to pass the connect account id header now so far all of the api calls that we've made have been related to our own account with stripe connect and in the case of passing a per request api key or a per request api version or with with stripe connect the id of the connected account we can take actions on behalf of accounts that have connected to us so in the case where we wanted to create another customer but this time on a connected stripe account we can say customer is equal to stripe customers create and recall that we have been passing in this top level argument maybe it has an email address and this is how we can create a customer on our own account but it turns out that the create and update and most methods when working with objects in the stripe api and with stripe php are going to accept this final optional argument where you can pass in these request params or request options you can think of it as a way to configure the request and so this might be your per request api version or api key but you can also pass stripe account here and uh i want i just wanted to call this out that this is a us a an argument that is a completely separate associative array which includes these request configuration options and in this case we can pass a stripe account value and the string value being the id of an account that has connected to my platform so that i can take actions on their behalf now if we run this code we'll see that it creates a customer object and if we inspected that more closely we would know that this customer object is attached to this connected account it does not connect is not attached to the platform it's connected to this disconnect account so this just wanted to call out that this is how you pass the request params or request options to configure the request and this stripe account here is actually sent in the headers the request headers when making a request this is not in the body so the email will be sent in the body the stripe account will be sent in the header as a quick recap in this episode you learn how to make requests to the stripe api to create retrieve update delete and list resources we looked at the api reference documentation covered custom methods nested services and passing request headers for connect thanks so much for watching we'll see in the next one you --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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