--- title: PHP Starter slug: php-starter published_at: 2021-04-09 17:00:20 +0000 updated_at: 2023-01-30 22:53:37 +0000 summary: description: Learn how we structure the Stripe Samples and other Stripe tutorials when working with PHP. We'll cover how to setup and install dependencies with Composer, load API keys and settings from .env, and how to setup a basic webhook handler. ### Table of contents 00:00 Overview 03:00 Create project structure 03:40 Test a \"hello world\" php script 04:10 Install stripe-php with composer 05:30 Make an API call to Stripe 06:40 Scaffold the HTML 07:58 Load API keys from .env 12:40 Convert server rendered example to JSON rendered example 14:12 Make POST with fetch client-side 16:27 Setup a webhook handler ### Presenter CJ Avilla - Developer advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ### Support If you have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team at https://support.stripe.com/. ### Feedback What would you like to see in future episodes? https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScx_BtXcakIJ_EFso-4-fnCrTVFXxsh-5BPM-SdhNG6W7kzbw/viewform tags: [stripe, payments, starter, php starter, @cjav_dev] views: 2895 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/php-starter youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voFjVwlKHvM youtube_id: voFjVwlKHvM embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/voFjVwlKHvM thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/voFjVwlKHvM/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # PHP Starter *Published: April 09, 2021* *Views: 2895* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voFjVwlKHvM) [![PHP Starter](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/voFjVwlKHvM/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voFjVwlKHvM) ## Description Learn how we structure the Stripe Samples and other Stripe tutorials when working with PHP. We'll cover how to setup and install dependencies with Composer, load API keys and settings from .env, and how to setup a basic webhook handler. ### Table of contents 00:00 Overview 03:00 Create project structure 03:40 Test a "hello world" php script 04:10 Install stripe-php with composer 05:30 Make an API call to Stripe 06:40 Scaffold the HTML 07:58 Load API keys from .env 12:40 Convert server rendered example to JSON rendered example 14:12 Make POST with fetch client-side 16:27 Setup a webhook handler ### Presenter CJ Avilla - Developer advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ### Support If you have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team at https://support.stripe.com/. ### Feedback What would you like to see in future episodes? https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScx_BtXcakIJ_EFso-4-fnCrTVFXxsh-5BPM-SdhNG6W7kzbw/viewform ## Transcript so in this video we're going to cover foundational topics and dig into the basics of using php to set up a very simple web server we're going to talk about how we use php in stripe samples a collection of github repositories demonstrating how to integrate specific stripe products and how we use it in these videos to build tutorials for you now you might just be getting started and are looking to accept your first online payment and we're just going to start from scratch today now if you already have a back-end setup and you're comfortable adding new routes and adding new scripts then you might want to head over to the stripe developers channel and check out one of the videos for a specific stripe integration using just simple php scripts allows us to keep the demo concise while still showing a full working example now if your app was written with a more feature rich framework like laravel a lot of the same fundamentals are going to apply they'll just be implemented a little bit differently i do want to take a moment and call out that this video covers setting up vanilla php without any frameworks and we're going to start by rendering variables directly server side into the html and then we'll uh convert that and refactor to render from a script which is sending back json in many stripe samples php is a little bit different than all of the other server implementations that we share and that's because the way the php is written we can render a lot of things server side into the html and that makes the demos change just ever so slightly from um having the the client and the server completely decoupled and just communicating via json so for instance our react clients that we have for some stripe samples won't work out of the box with a php server because php is going to be just rendering some of those variables directly in the html rather than rendering back json now it might be helpful to watch and refer to a couple other episodes on the channel before watching this one we have an episode about managing environment variables with php and we have another episode about how to use the stripe cli which is a handy tool for managing and building your web hook handler we'll have links to these and other resources in the description so just as a super quick agenda for today we're going to set up a basic index.php file and we'll just create a button on that page which when clicked will redirect to stripe checkout we'll do that with both a server-side rendered html file that uses php to create the checkout session and then we will refactor so that we have a separate php script for creating that checkout session that renders back json that we can then consume client-side using fetch which is a method exposed by the browser for making asynchronous calls to a server and then finally we're going to add a very simple web hook handler that will just act as a skeleton for uh for automating different actions based on events that are firing on your stripe account all right let's check let's take a look so we're going to jump into the terminal here and the very first thing i'm going to do is just create a composer.json file actually let's let's make a directory called server and we'll go into the server directory and then i'm going to just create let's see a composer.json file with just an empty json object to start okay let's also make a public directory now public is where all of our php scripts are going to live and yeah so we can we can change into the public directory and in here we'll create a new file called index.php so we're really starting from scratch and in index.php we can add some simple code here so if we say echo you know hello world and we save that now we should be able to say like php dash s um give my loopback address at port4242 this will start up a development server so now we can head over to the browser and take a look we browse to localhost 4242 and there we see hello world all right so we are off to a good start here okay so the next thing we want to do is let's install stripe and its dependencies so from the from the server directory i want to run composer require stripe slash stripe dash php now this will install the stripe php client library using composer so composer is going to be our tool for managing dependencies and the other thing that i want to do is go into composer.json and i'm going to add a scripts property here which is going to have a start script and what that's going to do is change into the public directory and then run that same php command to start our server again on our loopback address at port4242 okay so now if i run composer start directly from the server directory then it is changing into the public directory and firing up our server and again we can refresh the page and we see our hello world is working so that is that's good now we've got composer available to us to manage dependencies let's head back into php or index.php and when working with composer the very first thing you need to do is require that vendor autoload dot php file that is what is going to load up all of the dependencies that are installed with composer all right the next step that i wanted to take was actually firing up an instance of that stripe php client and then just rendering or making an api call to render back something so um there's a couple different ways that we can that we can create the client one is with this constructor function where we can call stripe stripe client and then pass in our secret key so i'm just going to hard code a secret api key here for stripe and now we have an instance of stripe that we can work with now the stripe php client library is a way to make api requests directly to stripe using php so for example we could say echo dollar stripe and we could say give me all the products from my stripe account and just print them out to the screen so now if we let's actually go into this other directory and we'll say composer start and now if we refresh the page instead of hello world now we get back a stripe collection which is just a bunch of json of stripe products that came back directly from the api so this is great this confirms that we're able to make an api request to stripe and receive back uh some data directly from stripe all right now let's scaffold out some html so rather than just rendering json of all of our products directly let's add some html here so we're going to have just uh some really basic structure i'm going to drop in some demo css and then just a little bit of structures that we use for for the office hours videos and here at the bottom i'm also going to add stripe js which is a script tag that we're going to load on every single page of our application when we integrate with stripe and that is always loaded from js.stripe.com now depending on the sample or the tutorial we may write a script tag directly in line here that um that will keep both our javascript and our html on the same page so you can sort of see it at the same time while we're going through a demo today i'm just going to initialize a new instance of stripe.js and pass it my publishable key this will just create a new instance of stripe.js alright so at this point if we refresh the page you'll see that we have just a little bit of structure we've got this office hours header at the top and we have a very simple body here all right so the next thing i wanted to do was rather than hard coding our api keys it's very common for us to load config like api keys or price ids or paths and things like that from environment variables or from dot n files in the server directory i'm going to create a new file called dot end now the dot end file is where we store these api keys so i'm going to add stripe publishable key and the stripe secret key and our webhook signing secret we often also will have a domain which is a bit of a misnomer because it's actually the base url for our application that's running sometimes we might even have a price which is a price id for this example we'll keep it simple and we'll just have our publishable secret webhook signing secret and domain these are all again set in our dot end now we don't want to share this.n file with anyone it this should be kept secret and these api keys should be kept secret you can find these in your stripe dashboard under the developers tab now rather than hard coding our api key here what we want to do is load some environment variables from that end file and we can do so with another package that we'll require with composer so we can say composer we require v lucas slash php.env now php.env is a package that helps us manage environment variables from those dot end files so now in our index.html we can load those dot end environment variables by calling dot end dot in create immutable load now the path we're passing here is going to be the path to the end file it turns out that when our index.php file is running in the public directory dot end will be in the parent directory so we we concatenate the current directory with slash dot dot to go up into the parent now we can access these environment variables directly through dollar underscore n like so furthermore we can render our publishable key using the short echo tag like this all right now that we've loaded our environment variables we're no longer hard coding our api keys let's move on to the next part of the demo where we cr we make another api call to stripe this time to create a checkout session so i'm going to create a new variable name here called session and inside of that i'm going to put a new checkout session so stripe checkout sessions create and i want to pass a whole bunch of default arguments okay this will create a brand new checkout session and store it into the session variable which we can then use again with this sort of uh short echo command to render the id into stripe stripe redirected checkout so we can say stripe.redirect to checkout and then we can pass in the session id is equal to our session id so we are we are just creating the the checkout session on the server side with php that the id for that checkout session is being rendered directly into our html which is actually uh rendering it into some javascript some some inline javascript that we've written and when when the page loads this time we should just be redirected directly to checkout so if we refresh the page here we will be redirected to the checkout page the stripe hosted checkout page so that is actually looking great however we probably only want to do that when someone clicks a button so let's add a button here to the page and we'll call it we'll just say that it's pay and then what we'll say is like when the button is clicked then do this this function here which will actually redirect to checkout so now we can refresh the refresh the page and now we have a giant pay button and when we click on the button we are redirected to checkout so that is great and this is really kind of like the basic way that you might implement stripe checkout using server-side rendering with php very simple right we have one api call here and then we are rendering to you know just one a one-liner directly in javascript which is redirecting to checkout let's take this one step further and talk about how we would extract this and so that we're using uh we're rendering back json from a php script rather than directly rendering into the html server side so if we were to create a new file here it's also common that we that we have a shared shared.php so we'll add shared.php into the public directory and in there we will want all of this setup so i'm going to put this into shared.php and then instead of requiring vendor autoload from our index.php we're going to just we will just require shared.php then instead of directly creating a checkout session here we're going to add a new php script that will create the checkout session server side and then render back just some json so we'll add a create checkout session.php file and in here we'll just render the same stuff but instead of rendering html at the end we're going to echo json and code that session and that will render back json when we receive a request to create checkout session now we can go back to our index delete this from the head and all we have at the top is requiring shared so that we have access to these environment variables with our dot inf dot load now instead of uh having we no longer have access to this dollar session right because we're no longer creating that checkout session on this page instead what we're going to do is use fetch to make a request to create checkout session which will return some json so let's do that here so i'm going to make a post request to create checkout session.php now technically you could pass along some data here if you wanted right like you could maybe you want to pass in the items that were purchased or your if it's a donation page you're going to pass in you know the amount that the donor wants to contribute to your campaign this will result in a response that includes the sessions data and we need this to be instead of an async function so i can just make my click handler the click handler function async so that we can use await this fetch method is exposed by the browser by default in javascript or most modern browsers at least all right now instead of rendering this checkout session id directly as a string instead we're going to render it with the response that we got from our call to create checkout session so now if we save that and refresh the page here the the contents of the page hasn't changed at all but the function might have changed so let's take a look so if we put a break point on line 32 by clicking on the gutter here and then click pay you'll notice that we do make it down to this redirect to checkout call this session json object which represents the data that was returned from uh from our new create checkout session script is just the json data for that checkout session and again all that we need and care about is this id which allows us to redirect to checkout so if we click play then we are redirected to checkout and all right we can enter our one of the test cards here and click pay and we're redirected right back to our localhost 4242 so in the stripe documentation you might see examples that are expecting that you're sort of like communicating via json that's how you might refactor from having a server side html rendered app or page into a json rendered page let's take the next step here and add a webhook handler to close out the the demo for today so if we go to the stripe documentation at stripe.comwebhooks there are a couple of different documents one is build webhooks the next is check signatures we're just going to go down to php here for the build webhooks dock and we'll just copy all of the php there and we'll add a new webhook.php file and we'll just drop that in and we can say this is a php file and let's talk about let's talk about this as we as we work through it so first we're going to receive any of the post data that came directly from stripe so again a web hook is a url or an endpoint or some php script on your server that will execute when it receives a post request directly from stripe so this is when an event happens on your stripe account for instance maybe a payment is successful or an invoice is coming due or a customer is being created all of these things are going to fire webhook events that you can listen for and build automations based on so when an event happens on your account stripe will send a post request to your webhook handler and here on this line we are extracting the contents of that post request body then we're going to deserialize that and store it in a a real stripe event object that'll be called dollar event that's where we're going to store the instance of the stripe event object then below here we can switch on the events type and depending on its type we might run a bunch of different automations so this is kind of like the entire webhook handler that is going to be our skeleton that we'll use for all demos in this case we might just remove all of these different case statements and uh and change the case that we care about to uh checkout dot session dot succeeded for ins or completed for instance right that is the event type that's going to fire when someone successfully checks out okay so this is how you build the webhook endpoint one other thing that i forgot is that we need to require shared.php so that we have access to all of those environment variables and having our api key set all right that's it we have a basic web server up and running with php let's talk about what we did just as a quick recap recall that we set up a really basic index.php page with some bare bones html here that we scaffold it initially we set up our api keys and loaded our environment variables from dot end using v lucas's php.env library and then we set our api key to create a new instance of a stripe client that we're going to use elsewhere then we we started out by redirecting to checkout on page load we improved that so that it only happened when we click a button and then we made it so that our checkout session was only created on click just in time potentially with any data that we may have passed here and then we redirected to checkout based on the checkout session that was created through this createcheckoutsession.php file which was creating the checkout session and then rendering back its data as json at this point you're ready to set up a basic php server and integrate stripe so i would recommend heading over to the stripe developer channel and taking a look at one of those specific integrations to see how to build and integrate with a specific stripe product like stripe connect or stripe billing or stripe elements or as we saw today stripe checkout all right we'll see you in the next one --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for 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