---
title: Accept a payment with the Payment Element using Ruby
slug: accept-a-payment-with-the-payment-element-using-ruby
published_at: 2022-12-26 15:00:11 +0000
updated_at: 2023-01-30 22:51:50 +0000
summary: 
description: In this episode, you'll learn how to accept a one-time payment with a custom form using Ruby on the server with Sinatra and the Stripe Payment Element on the client. The Payment Element enables you to collect several different payment method types from cards and bank accounts to wallets and buy-now-pay-later payment methods.   ### Presenter CJ Avilla - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev  ### Table of contents 00:00 Introduction 01:40 Install a sample with the Stripe for VSCode extension and CLI 03:23 Enable payment methods in the dashboard 04:29 Overview of payment flow 04:55 Create payment intent on the server 07:24 Collect payment details on the client 12:10 Submit payment details to Stripe 14:15 Build a confirmation page 16:02 Handle webhooks and post-processing events 18:33 Test your integration with Stripe test cards 19:51 Conclusion  ### Resources Accept a payment - https://stripe.com/docs/payments/accept-a-payment?platform=web&ui=elements&lang=ruby PaymentIntent API reference - https://stripe.com/docs/api/payment_intents/create?lang=ruby Learn all about webhooks - https://stripe.com/docs/videos/developer-foundations?video=webhook-helpers&lang=ruby  ### 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   ### 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 #ruby #payments
tags: [stripe, payments, ecommerce, stripedev, @cjav_dev, cjav_dev, accept a payment with the Payment Element, accept a payment with Ruby, Ruby payments, accept payments with ruby, handling payments with ruby, ruby payment acceptance, PaymentElement, Stripe payment element, Accept a payment with Stripe Payment Element]
views: 189
author: CJ Avilla
url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/accept-a-payment-with-the-payment-element-using-ruby
youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGmEZbLMjOs
youtube_id: OGmEZbLMjOs
embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/OGmEZbLMjOs
thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/OGmEZbLMjOs/hqdefault.jpg
type: video
---

# Accept a payment with the Payment Element using Ruby

*Published: December 26, 2022*
*Views: 189*

## Watch

[Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGmEZbLMjOs)

[![Accept a payment with the Payment Element using Ruby](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/OGmEZbLMjOs/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGmEZbLMjOs)

## Description

In this episode, you'll learn how to accept a one-time payment with a custom form using Ruby on the server with Sinatra and the Stripe Payment Element on the client. The Payment Element enables you to collect several different payment method types from cards and bank accounts to wallets and buy-now-pay-later payment methods. 

### Presenter
CJ Avilla - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev

### Table of contents
00:00 Introduction
01:40 Install a sample with the Stripe for VSCode extension and CLI
03:23 Enable payment methods in the dashboard
04:29 Overview of payment flow
04:55 Create payment intent on the server
07:24 Collect payment details on the client
12:10 Submit payment details to Stripe
14:15 Build a confirmation page
16:02 Handle webhooks and post-processing events
18:33 Test your integration with Stripe test cards
19:51 Conclusion

### Resources
Accept a payment - https://stripe.com/docs/payments/accept-a-payment?platform=web&ui=elements&lang=ruby
PaymentIntent API reference - https://stripe.com/docs/api/payment_intents/create?lang=ruby
Learn all about webhooks - https://stripe.com/docs/videos/developer-foundations?video=webhook-helpers&lang=ruby

### 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
 
### 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 #ruby #payments

## Transcript

hey what's up welcome back in this episode you're going to learn how to accept a one-time payment using a custom form with the payment element if you're looking for a simpler integration path we have the no code payment links option where you can set up a payment link directly through the dashboard and then share that with your customers through social media email text message Etc alternatively there's another option called stripe checkout this is a a very simple integration that has one API call on the server you redirect your customer to a stripe hosted page but in today's episode we're going to talk about integrating the payment element this allows you to build your own custom hosted form and collect lots of different payment method types so the payment element supports anything from cards all the way to bank accounts you've got support for wallets like Google pay and Apple pay all the way to buy now pay later like a firm and after pay clear pay so it is a great option for building your own custom form to accept a one-time payment so just as a quick roadmap for today we're going to install sample and we're going to go through the dashboard and talk about how you can enable payment methods these are going to be those payment methods that are dynamically rendered into the payment element every time the page loads and then we're going to create a payment intent on the server and use its client secret to render the payment element on the client so that we can collect payment details from the customer it will ultimately submit that payment to stripe and we're going to handle any of those post-processing events we're going to talk about web Hooks and a few other considerations that you might want to think about as you're building out your integration so let's get into it foreign [Music] we've got Visual Studio code up and running here we're going to use the striper vs code extension to install a starter template so we don't have to start from scratch today the stripe for vs code extension is available in the vs code extension Gallery if you search for stripe you'll find it over there and what we're going to do is go down here to samples and we're going to say start with a stripe sample we're going to type in starter and we're going to use the main integration with an HTML front end and today we're going to use Ruby on the server we'll call this new sample starter Dash Ruby and this is for our accept a one-time payment example we're going to clone the sample down to our local machine and we want to open that in the same window okay so what does this sample come with when we first install it so in the server directory we've got some files here that I'm going to run on the server side we also have some files that are going to provide a basic client using HTML and some a little bit of JavaScript that we're going to write in a bit so on the server we also have this dot end file that is pre-populated with our API keys because we have authenticated with the stripe CLI we know that the stripe CLI is aware of what our publishable key is and it also has this secret key that we can use to make API calls over in server.rb there's a bunch of routes that are already pre-configured for us one is for rendering back the index.html file we've got one that's going to send back our publishable key when we make requests to slash config and we're going to actually re-implement this route for creating payment intents in just a little bit we've also got a web hook Handler that already has a scaffolded web hook Handler for us and we can add in our own handling for different web hook event types as those fire on our account we'll come back to this in a little bit and talk about fulfillment before we do that though we want to go to our dashboard and enable some payment method types now from the stripe dashboard we can head over to the settings and to the payment method settings this is where we can manage our payment methods and enable or disable different ways that customers can pay through our payment element so you'll see here that we have cards enabled link Apple pay Google pay several different wallet methods there's lots of different bank redirects these are popular across Europe we also have some buy now pay later payment methods that are enabled finally we even have ACH direct debit as one of the payment methods that customers could use now if we wanted to enable Canadian pre-authorized debits we could click turn on and this would enable us to use Canadian pre-authorized debits as a payment method type inside of our payment flows so this is where we manage our payment methods and these are the payment methods that will be dynamically derived inside of our payment element when we render that and show it to customers so that's how you enable and manage your payment methods instead of needing to deploy any new code you can just come into the dashboard and enable or disable different payment method types so this is an overview of the payment flow we're going to implement today when the client lands on our page we're going to make a request back to our server which is going to make an API call to stripe to create a payment intent when that payment intent comes back from the API call we're going to extract that client secret property from the payment intent we're going to pass that to the front end so that it can be used to display and initialize the payment element so let's jump into this now and add a new route to our server to create payment intents okay so back inside of server.rb we're going to add a new route here called uh create payment intent so we're going to say we're going to create a new post route to create payment content and in here because we have the stripe for vs code extension installed we can say stripe payment intent create and hit Tab and that will show us the API call that we need to make now right now we're going to hard code 10.99 this is an integer in the smallest denomination possible for the given currency we can also change this to euros if we wanted to but I wanted to mention that this amount does not have to be a fixed amount like you could derive that based on some product ID that was passed in so you could use some product ID from the request to look up in the database to find out which amount you should charge if you wanted to do so so you don't have to hard code this there's several different currencies that you can accept and finally this payment method types is hard coding a list of payment method types but instead of passing this in explicitly because we just configured those payment methods in the dashboard we want to enable automatic payment methods and this will allow us to derive the payment method types that work for this given currency on the client inside of our payment element so this call is going to give us back a payment intent and we're going to just render the Json for the payment intents client secret property back to the clients so we're going to say payment intent.client Secret to Json and this is what we actually we're going to actually send back to the client so let's fire up Ruby here so we're going to change into the server directory we're going to say bundle install that will install our dependencies and now we can say Ruby server and that will fire up our Sinatra server so from our browser we can now go to localhost 4242 we can see that we're successfully rendering this index page that shows this sample now if we wanted to test this new endpoint we can create a new shell session and say curl Dash X post to localhost 4242 create payment intent and that will show us what we get back from the server and that is some Json that includes the client secret property for that payment intent so this is the client secret property that we want to render back to the client and we'll use that to initialize our payment element on the front end we'll do that next so on our client side we want to add a form to collect payment details so we're going to open up the index.html page and take a look at what we've got going on here so at the top notice that we are already installing stripe.js from js.stripe.com and inside of our HTML we're just going to change this to accept a payment and we're going to add a form here that's going to have some ID of uh payment form and inside of this form we're going to have a div with the ID of payment element that payment element div is where we're going to mount and install the payment element using stripe.js in just a bit next we're going to add a button and this button is just going to say pay and finally We'll add another div with the ID of uh error messages so that we can display any error messages that happen along the way all right now we can install a new script tag at the top of our HTML page here this is going to go to slash payment.js now let's create a new file called payment.js in our client directory if we're to refresh our page right now we're just going to see this button because our actual payment element has not loaded or been rendered onto the page so when the Dom is fully loaded we're going to fetch the the publishable key from the server then we're going to create the payment intent on the server and we're going to render payment element so the first thing we want to do is fetch the publishable key from the server so you could technically hard code your publishable key but that would require that you have to update this payment.js file every single time you roll your publishable key it's also a best practice to fetch a publishable key from the server when you're building any mobile clients with iOS Android react native and that's because oftentimes once a mobile client is installed it's possible that instance of your code will be on someone's phone for years and it will be really challenging to update a hard-coded publishable key and so it is a best practice to fetch our publishable keys from the server that's why we have this slash config route that's going to return a promise that will resolve with an object that has this dot Json property which returns another promise that will resolve with the actual content that we want which is our publishable key and we can use that to initialize a new instance of stripe so we're going to pass in our publishable key and we are good to go now the next step is that we want to make that API call to create our payment intent so our route on the server is called create payment intent and this fetch call is going to accept in an options block so that we can specify that we want this to be a post request we also want to tell it that we're going to use application jsons or content type is application Json and again this fetch call is going to return a promise that resolves with an object and that object is going to have a Json property or a Json method that will again return a promise that we can await and this is going to give us back our client secret property okay so this client secret is going to be used when we initialize our elements group so here we're going to say elements is striped out elements and typically if we were building a card element integration one of those older style Integrations where we just had the card element we would not pass any arguments into the stripe elements method here that is initializing an elements group but when we're using the payment element we do pass in the client secret here and that is so that we can use the client secret property of the payment intent client side to ask stripe what payment methods should be enabled when we render this payment method type all right we can also create a payment element by saying elements dot create payment and finally we can mount this payment element onto that div that we created inside of our form so this is the CSS selector for this div inside of our payment form and now we should be good to go so now when we refresh our page over here on the right hand side we can see that the payment element is rendered out you'll notice that we are collecting car details here but we can also use EPS sure pay lots of different payment method types all of which we enabled from the dashboard and these are being shown because they support Euros which is the type of currency that our payment intent was created with all right so now we can collect these payment details from the customer on the front end but at this point we're not actually handling submission of the form so we need to handle the submission of the form and take those payment details and submit the payment to stripe here we'll grab reference to that form element and when the form is submitted will prevent default for the event so that the form is not fully submitted back to the server and then we're going to submit those payment details and submit the payment directly to stripe using stripe.js this is a method called confirm payment and this accepts in an options block that has reference to the elements group so that is the same as this group here that we created with stripe elements earlier and it also accepts in a confirm params object that has at a minimum the return URL now this is the URL to which the customer will be redirected after they go through the payment flow if you wanted to you could disable redirection but that will only work for some payment method type so by setting this return URL and enabling redirection for all payment methods this is a nice standardized flow here we're just going to say let's go to window.location.href and we're going to split on the question mark in case there was a query string value there and then we're just going to say come back to like complete.html or something that's where we will redirect now this confirmed payment method is going to return a promise and that might resolve with an error property if there was some error submitting payment to stripe so if there was an error then what we're going to do is render that out into that error messages div that we created earlier we're going to say get element by ID error messages and that matches our ID here for this div and we're going to say messages dot inner text is equal to error.message okay now we are handling submission of our form and we should be redirected to this complete page so let's refresh and we'll enter in some test car details there is a 4242 card number this is the default successful sort of test card number we can use and when we click pay we'll notice that we are redirected to complete.html and in the query string parameter we can see the ID of the payment intent it's client secret and we can also see there's a redirect status here of succeeded so uh we're getting an error and that's because Sinatra doesn't know how to handle slash complete.html so we will modify that just ever so slightly let's make it go back to slash complete and then we will teach Sinatra what it means to be on the complete rep and that's where we're going to handle displaying a confirmation page to the customer all right so back on the server we're going to add a new route here for get to slash complete and this is the route where users are going to be redirected after they go through the payment flow now when we land on this complete route we're going to have some query string values one of them is the ID of the payment intent so we can actually say payment intent is stripe payment intent.retrieve and pass in the client secret property and we can pass in the ID of the payment intent that is available in param so we're going to say params payment intent and this should give us back our payment intent for now we'll just render the Json back so that we can see what is available on that page we've got to restart our server and then we'll go through the demo one more time all right we're going to go through the demo one more time we're going to enter those test card details just one more time and then click on pay and we're redirected back to that slash complete route and now we can see all of the Json for our payment intent we can see that the payment intent did succeed but one thing you might be wondering is should I be adding fulfillment logic in this complete route and the answer is no we don't want to handle any fulfillment as part of showing this completion page it's possible the user's browser does not redirect Because the Internet died or their computer battery died or for some reason they closed the browser window so for all of those reasons it's possible that the the end customers browser does not end up making this request to your server so instead it is a best practice to handle all fulfillment inside of web hooks so we're going to take a look at our web hook Handler we're going to talk about how we're going to test our web hook integration next of our web hook Handler here this is where we're going to receive notifications from stripe when events fire on our account now the first section here is all about receiving and parsing and verifying that that event did indeed come from stripe and then this last bit here allows us to switch on the type of the event that we are getting notified about so in this case we care about the payment intent dot succeeded event type now when a payment intent succeeded event fires we want to log out to the terminal that we have received a payment with this little bell notification so in order to test and build webhook Integrations you either need to set up some tunnel using software like ngrok or you need to have some other publicly accessible URL like publishing your test or your Dev environment to some staging server that has a publicly accessible URL when we're in development using stripe we can use the stripe for vs code extension to forward events to some specific URL in this case ours is localhost 4242 webhook and that's going to be where we want those account events forwarded when they fire on our stripe account so we can start up this listener and we'll see the output down in the terminal below it's going to show us any events that are firing so for instance if I refresh this page recall that we're going to make an API call to create a payment intent and when that happens we get this payment intent.created event that shows up in our listen log all right so now that we have this event type set up we need to restart our server now we're going to go back to the flow one more time and click on pay and now we see that payment received notification Bell is logged out to the terminal so again you want to use this web hook Handler for all of your fulfillment and the reason is that stripe is going to retry webhooks if for some reason your server is down it'll retry web hooks for up to three days with exponential back off you might be wondering how to test out your integration well over in the documentation for accepting a payment you can drill down into the test integration section and for each of the different payment method families between cards wallets Bank redirects Etc there are several different things that will allow you to test different scenarios so for instance we can grab this card this test card that ends in 3155 and we can use that as one of our test cards inside of the payment element and you'll notice that as we go through the payment flow here this will trigger a secure customer authentication payment flow so this is going to pop up a modal and in production this modal would contain a bank account 2fa or sort of like a one-time code or some way to verify that the customer is who they say they are and that they are allowed to authenticate this payment so that's one way that you can test sort of 3D secure and secure customer authentication is with that special card number another thing worth noting is in the documentation there are some optional steps depending on specific payment method types or QR code based payment methods these might require that you pass additional details when creating the payment intent or they might have other considerations like with Apple pay you'll need to go into the dashboard and make sure that you have an Apple pay domain set up and verified so just to review the entire flow the customer lands on the page and we use any information from that page to create a payment intent using the API and then when we return that payment intents client secret to the client we use that to build out a payment element on our custom form that's where customers enter their billing details and then we can submit that payment directly to striped client side and then the customer is redirected to a return URL where we display this return status or this success status completion status and finally we're handling fulfillment with our web hook that's where we're actually pulling from inventory and printing shipping labels and doing all those things that we might do when someone buys something from us thank you so much for watching and we'll see in the next one foreign [Music]

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