--- title: Authentication with stripe-java slug: authentication-with-stripe-java published_at: 2021-01-20 22:00:11 +0000 updated_at: 2023-01-30 22:53:57 +0000 summary: description: Learn about API keys and how to authenticate requests to the Stripe API using the stripe-java client library. You can set API keys globally or per-request. In this episode, we cover secret keys, public or publishable keys, restricted keys, and webhook signing secrets. ### Presenter CJ Avilla - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ### Resources Documentation: https://stripe.com/docs/api/authentication Official client library: https://github.com/stripe/stripe-java Code: https://github.com/stripe-samples/developer-office-hours/blob/master/2020-10-30-client-libraries/java/Authentication.java ### Table of contents 00:00 Overview 00:08 Authorization header 00:18 Types of API keys 00:38 Publishable keys 01:00 Secret keys 01:44 Restricted keys 02:07 Webhook signing secrets 03:33 Roll API keys 04:03 Set API key globally 05:37 Set API key per-request 06:58 Authenticate requests for Stripe Connect per-request 09:44 Authenticate requests for Stripe Connect globally 10:45 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. ### 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, stripe-java, java, SDK, client libraries, secret key, public key, publishable key, webhook signing secret, bearer authentication, auth, authentication, @cjav_dev] views: 5151 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/authentication-with-stripe-java youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4iJ07E_tA8 youtube_id: t4iJ07E_tA8 embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/t4iJ07E_tA8 thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/t4iJ07E_tA8/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Authentication with stripe-java *Published: January 20, 2021* *Views: 5151* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4iJ07E_tA8) [![Authentication with stripe-java](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/t4iJ07E_tA8/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4iJ07E_tA8) ## Description Learn about API keys and how to authenticate requests to the Stripe API using the stripe-java client library. You can set API keys globally or per-request. In this episode, we cover secret keys, public or publishable keys, restricted keys, and webhook signing secrets. ### Presenter CJ Avilla - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ### Resources Documentation: https://stripe.com/docs/api/authentication Official client library: https://github.com/stripe/stripe-java Code: https://github.com/stripe-samples/developer-office-hours/blob/master/2020-10-30-client-libraries/java/Authentication.java ### Table of contents 00:00 Overview 00:08 Authorization header 00:18 Types of API keys 00:38 Publishable keys 01:00 Secret keys 01:44 Restricted keys 02:07 Webhook signing secrets 03:33 Roll API keys 04:03 Set API key globally 05:37 Set API key per-request 06:58 Authenticate requests for Stripe Connect per-request 09:44 Authenticate requests for Stripe Connect globally 10:45 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. ### 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 at a high level the stripe api uses bearer authentication also called token authentication when making an api call you'll pass one of your api keys in the authorization http header with the value bearer and then a space and then your api key there's a few different types of api keys we've got publishable secret but there's also the lesser known restricted keys and also the somewhat related web hook signing secrets each type works with different permissions and use cases you can find or create these keys in your stripe dashboard publishable or public keys are used for making api requests to stripe directly from the front end these keys are used with stripe.js and mobile clients like stripe ios and stripe android these are very limited in scope because they are often visible in your client-side code so on the other hand we have these secret keys which are used to make api calls from your server to the stripe api and secret keys are never visible to the end user it should never be used with client-side code or shipped with mobile apps so your publishable and secret keys are going to be the most common most commonly used your api keys carry many privileges so be sure to keep them secure don't share your secret api keys in publicly accessible places like github or frontend code or you know any other place where users or people that you don't want having access to your stripe account might see two other types of keys that you might encounter are these restricted keys in web hook signing secrets so the restricted key is similar to a secret key however they provide you greater security by allowing you more granular control over which actions can be performed for specific resources so for instance you can create a restricted key which allows only the reading of the list of customers and you can use that api key to retrieve customers webhook signing secrets are used on the server to verify that webhook payloads did indeed come from stripe it's very specialized key so each of these api key types is a string that begins with the prefixes shown and ends with a random string of letters and numbers so pk underscore for publishable key sk underscore for secret key rk underscore for restricted key and wh sec underscore for web webhook signing secrets now when you're working with payments it's critical to make sure your integration works as expected and so stripe provides a test mode and several test card numbers to trigger different flows in your integration and ensure they're handled accordingly you can switch between viewing live and test mode by using the toggle in the stripe dashboard there's separate api keys for test in live mode you can distinguish between test and live mode keys by the extended prefix which includes the mode note that webhook signing secrets don't include the mode but publishable secret and restricted keys will show you live or test in the actual string value for the key when building your integration you'll use the test mode api keys and then when you're ready to move to production and take real payments it's a matter of replacing those keys with the live mode api keys so if for some reason your api keys are leaked or exposed as you've just seen in this demo you must roll those by going to the dashboard and using the role key action rolling will block this api key and generate a new one so we recommend reviewing the security history and the logs for the requests that were related to this key and any web hook endpoints that were created with this key will stay active even after the key is rolled so make sure to review your list of webhook endpoints to ensure that those are what you expect all right let's take a look in java so i'm going to open a file called authentication.java and so for stripe java the api key can either be set globally or per request the most common is to set it globally this is done by setting the api key like so we say stripe.api key equals the string value for the api key and that will allow us to make requests so i'm going to create just a simple request here to retrieve some customers from the api so we can say customer list params params is equal to customer list params.builder dot build and this will give us a params object we're going to say customer collection customers is equal to customer.list and we pass in those params and now we should print those out below so if we run this authentication.java file we get back the json data for all of the customers and so if we grabbed an id for an individual customer we could change this request so rather than listing customers we could return an individual customer by passing its id to retrieve and this was now called customer all right so let's see if this also works and we get back the json for an individual customer now if you're working with multiple of your own stripe accounts for your integration not through connect but multiple of your own stripe accounts you might want to swap out the api key per request so all api requests are all api methods here that will make api requests to the stripe api support an optional request argument parameter where you can pass the api key per request so we want to build up an instance of request options we can say request options is equal to request options and again we're going to use this builder pattern but this time we're going to say set api key and we'll pass in our string value for api key and then finally we call build at the end and now this request options allows us to pass the second argument to retrieve request options and now we don't need to set the the api request globally because now we can use the request options to set the api key per request so if we run this same api call we get back the json data again for that individual customer so this allows you to set the api key per request now if you're working with connect where you're collecting payments on behalf of other vendors so for example if you're building a platform like lyft or shopify then you'll need to pass the id of the connected account in the request options so let's take a look at how to make a request with connect so here i'm going to copy these same request options and we need to in addition to setting the api key we also need to set the stripe account so this is going to be the string value for the stripe account that we want to make the request on behalf of so i'm going to paste in an account id there so this is the platform api key and this is the stripe account id i'll comment this out so this is with connect and api key set per request so if we run this this should fail because that customer id does not belong to the connected account this customer id that we were using belongs to the platform so in order to get a customer id that we can retrieve we first need to know the customers that belong to this connected account so we can comment this out and then we can use our customer list params and first make a request to retrieve the customer collection for the connected account so now i'm passing in the customer list params and the request options and this should give back a list of customers for the connected account if we run this again you'll see that we get several customers back all of which are related to that connected account so if i grab a specific id here we can now change this id to be the id of a customer on the connected account and now we should be able to run this and this will give us a uh the result of an individual customer on the connected account remember that the combination of your platform api key and the connected accounts id is how you authenticate requests that work with objects related to that custom account or to that connected account note that you must also set this connected accounts id and your your platform publishable key when you're working with these objects on the client so when you're working with stripe gs or stripe ios stripe android you'll additionally need to set the stripe account id on the client when you're working with those so it's not just on the server let's finish this up with one more example where we set the platform account id globally and then the connected just the connected account id per request so we're going to we're going to set the stripe api key globally with connect and api keys set globally okay so we can remove these so now we're setting our platform api key again this is just the the id or the api key the secret key for the platform and then this is the connected accounts id and again we're going to be able to retrieve that customer that belongs to the connected account because we are combining our platform api key with the connected accounts id which is which allows us to retrieve this customer which belongs to this connected account so if we run this we'll see the json for that individual customer so that is how you authenticate requests using stripe java just as a super quick recap we talked about types of api keys where to find those in your stripe dashboard how to roll those how to use your api keys globally or per request and i hope you enjoyed it we'll see you in the next one --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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