---
title: Authentication with stripe-python
slug: authentication-with-stripe-python
published_at: 2021-01-11 13:00:32 +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-python 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-python Code: https://github.com/stripe-samples/developer-office-hours/blob/master/2020-10-30-client-libraries/python/authentication.py  ### 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 05:33 Set API key per-request 06:02 Authenticate requests for Stripe Connect per-request 07:38 Authenticate requests for Stripe Connect globally 08:28 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-python, python, py, authentication, secret key, restricted key, public key, publishable key, bearer authentication, bearer auth, @cjav_dev]
views: 8247
author: CJ Avilla
url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/authentication-with-stripe-python
youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRvlMeBks6k
youtube_id: gRvlMeBks6k
embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/gRvlMeBks6k
thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/gRvlMeBks6k/hqdefault.jpg
type: video
---

# Authentication with stripe-python

*Published: January 11, 2021*
*Views: 8247*

## Watch

[Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRvlMeBks6k)

[![Authentication with stripe-python](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/gRvlMeBks6k/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRvlMeBks6k)

## Description

Learn about API keys and how to authenticate requests to the Stripe API using the stripe-python 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-python
Code: https://github.com/stripe-samples/developer-office-hours/blob/master/2020-10-30-client-libraries/python/authentication.py

### 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
05:33 Set API key per-request
06:02 Authenticate requests for Stripe Connect per-request
07:38 Authenticate requests for Stripe Connect globally
08:28 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 let's take a look at authentication with stripe python so we'll open authentication.pi and the very first thing we want to do is import stripe and for straight python 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 stripe.api key equals the string of our api key and this allows us to now make requests directly using the stripe python library and those will be authenticated using that globally set api key so now we can make an api request with stripe python like so we would say print maybe stripe.customer.list and this would return the list of customers as json so if we run that we see that we get back the json that does indeed have the customers for us if we grab one of the ids of the customers here we can say stripe customer retrieve and pass in that string id of the customer and that would retrieve that customer id the json for that customer or for the customer with that id so this is setting the api key globally now if you're using multiple of your own stripe accounts for your integration and not through connect then you want you might want to swap out the api key per request all of the methods in the stripe python client library support an optional request argument parameter where you can specify the api key like so we can say api key equals the api key string and then if we comment out the globally set api key this will make the request per or set the api key per request so if we run again this code we see that we get back the same json for that customer so this is how you set the api key per request now if you're working with stripe 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 the request options so the way that we do this with stripe python is by specifying the stripe account in the api call show how to work with connect so here if we have an account id or if we already know the id of the account the stripe account that we have connected to then we can list the customers similar to how we did before we can say print stripe.customer.list and then we can specify the api key as our api key that is the platform api key and then separately we can specify the stripe account which is going to be account id so this will allow us to retrieve the list of customers which is attached to this connected account and again if we grab the id of one of these customers we can retrieve that customer so we can say stripe customer retrieve and pass in the customer's id and specify just the stripe account now this works this is how you would make the request with the connect header so we're specifying the the account id and the connect header and our api key per request so this is a per request but we can also set our platform api key globally and then only specify the stripe account id per request so here we're setting the api key our platform api key globally and then we're passing in the id of the connected account per request and this will give us the same result so this allows us to authenticate and retrieve that individual customer and we have set the api key globally here in this case note 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 so you must also set this connected account id and your platform publishable key when working with objects on the front end with either stripe.js or stripe ios so on the client you'll also have to specify the account id when you're working 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

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