--- title: Authentication with the Stripe Postman collection slug: authentication-with-the-stripe-postman-collection published_at: 2021-08-16 17:00:19 +0000 updated_at: 2023-01-30 22:53:16 +0000 summary: description: Learn about API keys and how to authenticate requests to the Stripe API using the Stripe Postman collection. 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 Dawn Lambeth - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/dawnlambeth ### Resources Documentation: https://stripe.com/docs/api/authentication Postman collection: https://www.postman.com/stripedev/workspace/stripe-developers/overview ### Table of contents 00:00 Overview 00:18 Authorization header 00:28 Types of API keys 00:58 Publishable keys 01:10 Secret keys 01:54 Restricted keys 02:23 Webhook signing secrets 03:43 Roll API keys 04:20 Set API key environment variable in Postman 04:50 Fork the environment template 06:05 Set API key globally 06:58 Set API key per-request 08:04 Authenticate requests for Stripe Connect per-request 08:42 Authenticate requests for Stripe Connect globally 10:44 Conclusion ### Support If you have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team at https://support.stripe.com/ or on Discord: 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, authentication, Postman, Postman authentication, Stripe Postman, Stripe postman authentication, Stripe API authentication, Stripe API Authentication with Postman, Authentication with the Stripe Postman collection, @cjav_dev, @dawnlambeth] views: 3036 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/authentication-with-the-stripe-postman-collection youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFJ_z8v35e8 youtube_id: ZFJ_z8v35e8 embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZFJ_z8v35e8 thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ZFJ_z8v35e8/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Authentication with the Stripe Postman collection *Published: August 16, 2021* *Views: 3036* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFJ_z8v35e8) [![Authentication with the Stripe Postman collection](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ZFJ_z8v35e8/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFJ_z8v35e8) ## Description Learn about API keys and how to authenticate requests to the Stripe API using the Stripe Postman collection. 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 Dawn Lambeth - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/dawnlambeth ### Resources Documentation: https://stripe.com/docs/api/authentication Postman collection: https://www.postman.com/stripedev/workspace/stripe-developers/overview ### Table of contents 00:00 Overview 00:18 Authorization header 00:28 Types of API keys 00:58 Publishable keys 01:10 Secret keys 01:54 Restricted keys 02:23 Webhook signing secrets 03:43 Roll API keys 04:20 Set API key environment variable in Postman 04:50 Fork the environment template 06:05 Set API key globally 06:58 Set API key per-request 08:04 Authenticate requests for Stripe Connect per-request 08:42 Authenticate requests for Stripe Connect globally 10:44 Conclusion ### Support If you have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team at https://support.stripe.com/ or on Discord: 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 this video covers authentication when you're working with the stripe api postman collection to start we'll look at a quick general overview of authentication to the stripe api and then come back and apply that information within the postman environment 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 front end 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 webhook 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 hook 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 now take a look at authentication within the postman environment with the stripe api collection in this example i'll be using a copy of the collection that i've already forked from the stripe public workspace if you don't have this setup already be sure to check out our installation video we and postman recommend that you store your api keys as environment variables and so the first thing i'm going to do is fork the environment template from the stripe developers workspace so i'll go over to that workspace right now and here's the stripe environment template under the workspaces environments go ahead and create a fork i'll give it a name and i'll tell postman where i want it to create this fork now once my fork's created postman returns me to my workspace and we can see that there's just one variable in this environment and that's for my secret key so let's go over to my stripe dashboard now and grab my key we'll copy my key and put it back here in the in the environment i'll click save and there's one more thing i need to do and that set this environment as active now the stripe api collection allows you to set your api keys as either globally for the whole collection or on a per request basis to start let's set it globally so i'm going to come over to my collection and i'm going to look at this authorization section here and we can see down here where it says token there's some placeholder text for bearer token and i'm going to replace that with the secret key variable i just created i'll click save and then to uh to confirm that i did this correctly i'm going to create a customer so i'll come over here to the customer calls click on create a customer and since there aren't any parameters that are required for this call i can just click send and here we go we can see a customer was created and returned to me in the response now there might be times where you need to set your api key on a per request basis for example if you had more than one stripe account and you were swapping back and forth between those accounts per request it might make sense to set it per request rather than globally so let's do that now we're going to go back to my stripe dashboard we'll come down to another account i have grab the api key for this second account and in our environment we'll add a secret key um variable for this key so we have that as added and saved and now let's create a customer this time on our second account so to start let's look at this authorization section on this call itself and we can see that the type of authorization is inherit auth from parent so this call is inheriting the authorization scheme from the collection let's replace that with bearer token and then set that to the second key we just created we'll click send and again we have a customer id returned to us in the response it ends with l03 and if we go back to our stripe dashboard and look at the logs for this account we can see here that the last call to this account was this create customer call and there's that um that same id we're seeing in postman now if you're working with connect where you're collecting payments on behalf of other connected accounts you'll need to pass both your api key as well as the connected accounts id in this case the authentication you're using is really the combination of those two things so let's do that now i'm going to make a couple calls here so i'll go back to my environment and create a variable for my connected account click save we'll go back to our create a customer call one more time we're going to set the authorization back to inherit auth from parent because we want to use the secret key associated with that first stripe account we're also going to add a request header that sets the connected accounts id we'll go ahead and click send and once again we've had a customer return to us now how can we sort of prove to ourselves that we created this customer on the connected account and not on the platform account well let's copy this customer id here we'll go over to retrieve a customer and we'll replace this placeholder value here in the url for the request with that customer id so that we can retrieve this customer click send and we get an error that there's no such customer found with this id and that makes sense because we've made the call just with the api key set for the collection so to retrieve this customer from the connected account we need to add that stripe account header just like we did when we created the customer click send one more time and there's our customer return to us so as we stated earlier in the video keeping your api keys safe is really important and so we recommend that you use the postman resources that postman provides to do this please visit their blog post how to use api keys and be sure to follow their best practices that's it for authentication be sure to check out our making requests video to see more examples of making requests using the stripe api postman collection [Music] --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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