--- title: Authentication with stripe-node slug: authentication-with-stripe-node published_at: 2021-01-15 20:15:03 +0000 updated_at: 2023-01-30 22:53:58 +0000 summary: description: Learn about API keys and how to authenticate requests to the Stripe API using the stripe-node 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-node Code: https://github.com/stripe-samples/developer-office-hours/blob/master/2020-10-30-client-libraries/node/authentication.js ### 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 05:10 Set API key per-request 06:30 Authenticate requests for Stripe Connect globally 09:30 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-node, authentication, auth, bearer auth, secret key, public key, publishable key, restricted key, webhook signing secret, signing secret, API, sdk, node, node.js, @cjav_dev] views: 13458 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/authentication-with-stripe-node youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5RoYDEIhCI youtube_id: R5RoYDEIhCI embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/R5RoYDEIhCI thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/R5RoYDEIhCI/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Authentication with stripe-node *Published: January 15, 2021* *Views: 13458* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5RoYDEIhCI) [![Authentication with stripe-node](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/R5RoYDEIhCI/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5RoYDEIhCI) ## Description Learn about API keys and how to authenticate requests to the Stripe API using the stripe-node 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-node Code: https://github.com/stripe-samples/developer-office-hours/blob/master/2020-10-30-client-libraries/node/authentication.js ### 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 05:10 Set API key per-request 06:30 Authenticate requests for Stripe Connect globally 09:30 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 okay let's take a look at how to authenticate api requests to the stripe api using node on the server so i'm going to open authentication.js so for stripe node the api key can either be set globally or per request the most common is globally and you'll see this this require statement where we're importing stripe and then we set the api key here so i'm just going to set the string value for my api key at the top uh and then down below we can now authenticate requests so let's list out our customers and print those to the console i'm going to say node authentication.js and when i run that i get back the json for the objects the customer objects in my stripe account so if i grab one of those ids i can change this from a list to a retrieve and pass in that string id and similarly i'll get back to json for that individual stripe customer now if you're using multiple of your own stripe accounts for your integration not through connect but uh through your own integration then you might want to swap out the api key per request so all requests uh all the methods that allow you to make api requests support this optional request argument where you can specify the api key like so so instead of setting the api key globally so if we just delete this from here and instead we set the api key here in the request options this allows us to set it per request so now when we run this request we're going to get back the same json but that allows us to set it per request so if you have multiple api keys or multiple accounts you can sort of like specify which account you're making a request from by setting that api key per request again this is not for connect but can come in handy if you have multiple stripe accounts so this up here is globally globally set so let's actually just say like this back in here and then if we're making it per request then we might do something like this all right let's talk about connect so if you're working with connect where you're collecting or facilitating payments on behalf of other vendors so if you're building a platform like lyft or shopify you'll need to pass the id of the connected account in the request options the combination of your platform api key and the id of the connected account is what allows you to authenticate access to the objects on that connected account so let's take a look at what that looks like so here this is a per request and then this one is going to be with connect so down here we say with connect and we're going to take a look here all right so with connect i'm going to show how to set the api key globally and then use the connected accounts id per request this is going to be the most common pattern so rather than setting the api key there we're going to set stripe account and this is going to be equal to the string value for the stripe account id of your connected account now i'm going to run this and we're going to change this to customer now you'll note that this customer the id of this customer is a customer that lives on the platform but not on the connected account so this request should actually fail with no such customer so if we run this code we get a different error because i change or i use the wrong casing here okay so no such customer customer with this id that's because the customer with this id belongs to the platform not to the connected account so if instead we change this to list and we pass in an empty object because we don't have any list params and then the second object is the request params including the connected accounts id we get back all the the customers on the connected account so if we grab an id from a customer on the connected account and change this back to retrieve and then change this back to the id of the customer and re-run this we should get back the for customer on the connected account so um it is again it is the combination of your platform api key and the connected accounts id which allow you to authenticate requests to objects which belong on that connected account note also that you have to set this connected account id and your platform's publishable key when working with stripe.js on the client too so it's not just on the server it's also on the client so if you're working with stripe ios or stripe android you would need to set the connected account id in the client when you're making requests on behalf of this account so now you should be fully equipped to authenticate requests to the stripe api either by setting the api key globally per request or using the connected accounts id to make requests with connect 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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