--- title: Authentication with stripe-php slug: authentication-with-stripe-php published_at: 2021-01-13 19:00:01 +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-php 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-php Code: https://github.com/stripe-samples/developer-office-hours/blob/master/2020-10-30-client-libraries/php/authentication.php ### 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 06:10 Set API key per-request 08:12 Authenticate requests for Stripe Connect globally 11:30 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. tags: [stripe, payments, stripe-php, php, API, authentication, auth, bearer auth, secret key, api keys, public key, publishable key, dashboard, Stripe Authentication, Stripe API keys, Stripe PHP, Stripe PHP Authentication, @cjav_dev] views: 13037 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/authentication-with-stripe-php youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeufP46S5BI youtube_id: CeufP46S5BI embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/CeufP46S5BI thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/CeufP46S5BI/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Authentication with stripe-php *Published: January 13, 2021* *Views: 13037* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeufP46S5BI) [![Authentication with stripe-php](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/CeufP46S5BI/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeufP46S5BI) ## Description Learn about API keys and how to authenticate requests to the Stripe API using the stripe-php 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-php Code: https://github.com/stripe-samples/developer-office-hours/blob/master/2020-10-30-client-libraries/php/authentication.php ### 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 06:10 Set API key per-request 08:12 Authenticate requests for Stripe Connect globally 11:30 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. ## 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 php we have authentication.php here so for for php the api key can be set either globally or per request the most common is to set it globally and we now have two patterns in php we have static methods we have these static methods we also have client and services so i'm going to show you how to globally set the api key in both ways so first we'll show globally set api key and it looks something like this we say stripe stripe set api key and we pass in the string value for our api key and then we can make calls to the api we'll see the results in the console here as json you can see all the json that was returned so this is using a globally set api key with the static method style this is the older pattern now if we wanted we could also change this to retrieve and pass in the string id for a customer and this would return the json for that customer now if you're using the newer client and services pattern then we can also globally set the apa the api key this way so we would say something like this we want to create a new instance of stripe is a so stripe is going to be a new stripe client where we pass in the api key when we initialize the instance and then we can make api calls with this client so now we can say something like echo you know dollar stripe customers all and this is a functionally equivalent to that first api call that we made and it returns all of the json for the same stripe account similarly we can change all to retrieve and pass in the string value for that customer id if we run it again we get back to json just for that single customer if you're using multiple of your own stripe accounts for your integration and not through connect then you might want to swap out the api key per request so all api requests will support an optional request arguments parameter where you can specify the api key so rather than setting the api key globally like this we can instead pass the api key in request parameters so we can say you know the the request body is going to be this first set of parameters we're going to leave that empty and we're going to set the api key here equal to our api key okay now notice that we're not setting the api key globally we're setting it per request so this allows us to make requests with different api keys with every single request if for some reason we were managing multiple different stripe accounts as part of our integration and not part of connect this is only if you yourself are maintaining maybe a stripe account for your european customers and a different stripe account for your u.s customers for some reason all right let's take a look at how we might set the api key per request with static methods so here i'm going to just copy this and paste it down below and then we'll say this is going to be uh per request and we'll comment this back in now we have to have an api key set um in order for this to work we have to have an api key set globally but when we make the api call to retrieve the customer we can pass in this api key in the second argument in the request params that is the second argument when we're working with static methods with the client services it's the third argument um so then we can say sk2 and this will make the api key set per request and we'll return the json for that individual customer okay let's move on to working with connect okay so let's comment this out so with connect 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 you'll need to pass the id of the connected account in these request parameters the combination of your platform api key and the connected accounts id is how you authenticate requests that work with objects related to that connected account so note that you must also set this account id and your platform publishable key when working with stripe.js or stripe ios on the client also so it's not just on the server it's on the client too when you're working with objects related to that connected account you'll want to pass in your platform's api keys and your connected accounts id so let's take a look at how this works so we set our platform key globally and we're going to do it first with static methods and then separately we're going to say customer.all and pass in the connected account id so here we want to say stripe account point set and then the account id for the connected account so if we run this we'll get back some json and you'll see this is the json for the customers related to this connected account so similarly we can change all to retrieve and pass in the string value for the customer we want to retrieve we see the json for that customer returned when we make the request now this also works with passing an api key per request so if we wanted to we could pass both the stripe connected account id and our platform api key per request so we could say something like api key is our platform a platform api key uh here and that would work per request uh generally when working with connect though you just need at a minimum to pass the id of the connected account and set your platform api key all right let's take a look at how this works with connect and the client services model so down below we'll copy all of this to create a new client and we'll say this is uh with connect so we're going to set our api key globally and then per request we need to set the stripe account and this is going to be the id of the connected account and initially we'll just say all return all the customers so that we can see the list of customers related to this stripe account so if we run this we should get back the list of customers we do and again we have this id for an individual customer so we can say retrieve and pass in that id and keep those request params and now we get the json for just that individual customer for the connected account so that's how you handle authentication 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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