--- title: Checkout and Customer Portal with Node.js express and SendGrid on Repl.it slug: checkout-and-customer-portal-with-node-js-express-and-sendgrid-on-repl-it published_at: 2022-03-16 10:00:07 +0000 updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:13:39 +0000 summary: description: Learn how to setup the Stripe Customer portal with magic link email authentication. sendgrid: https://docs.sendgrid.com/for-developers/sending-email/quickstart-nodejs code: https://replit.com/@CJAvilla/checkout-customer-portal-node tags: [cjav_dev, web development tutorials, web development for beginners, vim, ruby, rails, javascript, @cjav_dev] views: 970 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/checkout-and-customer-portal-with-node-js-express-and-sendgrid-on-repl-it youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4R_ABkeBIOU youtube_id: 4R_ABkeBIOU embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/4R_ABkeBIOU thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/4R_ABkeBIOU/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Checkout and Customer Portal with Node.js express and SendGrid on Repl.it *Published: March 16, 2022* *Views: 970* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4R_ABkeBIOU) [![Checkout and Customer Portal with Node.js express and SendGrid on Repl.it](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/4R_ABkeBIOU/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4R_ABkeBIOU) ## Description Learn how to setup the Stripe Customer portal with magic link email authentication. sendgrid: https://docs.sendgrid.com/for-developers/sending-email/quickstart-nodejs code: https://replit.com/@CJAvilla/checkout-customer-portal-node ## Transcript hey what's up welcome back in this episode we're going to use replit node.js the send grid api to send some email we're going to integrate the stripe customer portal with checkout this is sort of building on a previous episode where we built uh donation flow with replit and stripe checkout so we're going to kind of like modify that ripple a little bit to use the customer portal so rachel has been in some of our live streams she also left a comment here on this video she says if you're down it would be super helpful to see a video around uh setting up auth and tool like stitch so we're not going to use stitch today for a couple different reasons but um so that it will she says so that it'll work with the customer portal preferably in node so we're going to use node today maybe you can just do a quick demo and replay as you did for the variable checkout prices it helped uh helped a ton okay so the reason we're not going to use stitch is that they don't have a way to attach sort of like metadata or outside data to the user objects that they have so the whole key to implementing the customer portal is storing the stripe customer id alongside some authenticated user so you need some form of authentication and so what i want to do today is we're just going to use like sort of magic link authentication so we're going to send someone an email and that will be kind of like what they uh what we use as our form of authentication so i'm going to go down i think variable checkout i can't remember um variable checkout i can't remember if it was this one um that we did in the past like for for a previous video or not yeah check out donations i think this might have been it okay so in this um yeah all right let's make this a little bigger okay so in this repel we're going to actually fork this so i'm going to click on the name and say fork and we're going to call this checkout customer portal node or something i don't know and that's going to create a new reple4s that we can play around with and we need a couple of things so first let's kind of just like go through what we've already got set up so we're installing express we're initializing an express app we're going to use that we're using resolve we're installing the stripe node client library to make api calls to stripe on the server we're using the express json middleware we're also going to say app.use express.url in code encoded i don't know if it's express url encoded and coded that's going to let us send just like raw form data instead of having to use javascript um on the front end and then we have a success page or yeah this this is just going to render back an index.html page which we'll see here on the right and then um right now the html page just has an amount and we click donate and then our success page when we come back we just show like a blob of json for the checkout session and here's where we're creating the checkout session we're pulling the donation amount out of this form and on the form we can actually simplify this quite a bit now so we're using our publishable key to initialize an instance of stripe this is our form it's super simple it's just an amount that we can enter here and then we were using javascript on the client in fact we don't even need stripe.js on the client anymore and we were passing like all of this stuff down we actually don't need any of this so we can like rip all of this out because we're just going to pass back form encoded at the time of the recording of the last video we didn't support server side redirect for checkout so i'm just going to blow all of that away and then we're going to replace this form instead of having the id we're just going to give it a an action and that's going to be create checkout and a method so that we're sending a post request back to the server now in addition to an amount we're also going to collect the email address and the reason is that we want in this case we want to be able to like log back in as the user or like associate some sort of checkout session back with an existing user so this is going to be an email input it doesn't have a step and instead of id here we actually need to change this to an to a name to the name name attribute and the name for this one is going to be email and we still have this donate button let's change that to like subscribe or something because donate doesn't really make sense in the in like the concept of the customer portal per se because we yeah i don't know we're like uh i don't know even a mount is odd like let's take out a mount we'll just take in the email address and we're gonna say subscribe and then maybe above this we'll say like h1 like my awesome service and then you're gonna i don't know pay like um ten dollars a month for my awesome service and yeah sure okay whatever all right so now we've got something that looks like this we're going to pay 10 a month we're going to enter our email and click subscribe and what we want to do is when we call create checkout session now on the back end we're going to pull off the email address and we need to do a couple things like first of all in practice you would um like pull the the authenticated user from the database but what we're gonna do is we're gonna use nodes or i'm sorry replits database things so they have like a node node database so you pull in at replace database and then you can create a new instance of the database and then the way that we like get and set from it is just by calling like db.get and db.set it's a super simple like key value pair database and so when someone gives us their email what we're going to do is we're going to try to look them up in the database so we're going to say like const customer id is await db.get and we're going to pass in their email address now if they're if we've never seen this person before they've never logged in it's kind of like a new user then we're going to not have an email addre we're not going to get back a customer id so customer id so if there's no customer id what we want to do let me change that to a let what we actually want to do is we want to create a new customer and that's going to be using the stripe api so we'll call stripe.customers.create and we'll pass in their email address that we just got from the form that's going to create a customer with that specific email and then we can use that customer id and save it in the database so we're going to say db.set email and the value is going to be customer.id that's just going to make like kind of a hash of email points at stripe customer id in this database very simple and both the get and set methods for the database are going to return promises so we always want to await these that bit me when i was like playing around with the database for the first time okay and then what we want to do after that is we want to set our local variable for the customer id equal to customer.id so that we can use it down below when we create our checkout session so when we create the checkout session this is like what the customer sees when they redirect the payment flow we want to pass in the specific customer id so that this checkout session is associated with this specific user and that's tied to their email address and we can kind of like keep everything sort of in sync since this recording we actually don't need this payment method types thing anymore because now we have automatic payment methods which is way better um okay so instead of like hard coding the success url here this is like the old repel we can i don't know we can like look at the environment and figure out the url so how do we want to do this let's create a new javascript file here called console.js and this will just let us play around with the console so i'm going to console.log process.n and then in the shell i can say node console and that will just like print out all of the different stuff so we have the repel slug and you'll notice that this rebel slug checkout dash customer dash portal-node is the first sub-domain in like our big domain here so we want to use that okay so the idea is that we're gonna like kind of build up a url here so let's go back up to the top here we're just gonna say const base url is equal to or maybe like domain is equal to um and then we're gonna have process dot n dot this thing and then we're going to like we'll add all the different components here so i think the next one is i don't know can we find okay so my name repple owner so process.m rep owner and then it's repple and then it's co and then we're going to join these by dot so that we have a domain and then we can build our base url off of that using https colon slash and then the domain and that should give us sort of like a base url that we can use when we're building or when we're constructing these other sort of urls so now our success url here we can make that much better by saying let's just use the like base url and this will make it should make it a little bit easier for y'all to copy it and then use it if you need to or if you want to and then we can say i don't know base url and cancel i mean we should probably have a cancel situation also but whatever also you can pass in that checkout session id like in the url that we're specifying as a success url we're going to give this checkout session id which will be populated with the id of the checkout session when they're redirected back and that's nice because then we can use that for um refetching the checkout session in success or cancel case either case all right line items this is all the stuff that they're actually going to pay for in this case what we're doing is we were taking in the amount and then doing a bunch of stuff with it but let's just pass in ten dollars and we'll say usd and the product data is test and in the case of a subscription which is really like the reason that we want to use the customer portal generally is if we have someone who's subscribed we want to have some recurring interval thing that tells them interval that they're going to pay this much per month or per year per week per day etc etc the mode in this case is going to be subscription and the submit type i'm just going to remove that for now and then instead of sending back this session id we're going to like redirect to the session.url and i think i don't know i think that might work let's go give it a whirl we have to do this in a new window because we can't use it inside of like inside of the replit iframe thing it doesn't work okay i'll say wave at cjav dev and click subscribe cannot post to create checkout why not oh create session we'll change that all right go back refresh um wave at cgi dot dev do i need to restart the server i think i do all right that's annoying all right let's go back uh again hmm couldn't create checkout that's like totally a thing huh let's see wave at cjf.gov boom okay i think it's doing something oh you know what it's doing it's failing because i don't have my api keys set i think right uh yeah we don't have our api key sets we need to go to secrets and we need to make sure that our environment variables are set and there's one right up here that we're trying to use to initialize stripe so i'm going to use my secret key there so that that is on the server and then what i'm gonna do is uh this is like yeah uh if it crashes like that we don't have very good error handling right now but that's fine wave at cjav dot dev okay now we're redirected to stripe checkout and we can see that we're going to pay 10 per month here's our email address and all of our information blah blah blah let's use our test card number okay uh jenny rosen yeah sure i mean i don't know let's see let's make it me all right one two three four five and i do want to save my information for faster checkout next time and i do i want to give you my email sure hopefully that's not texting a real person this is in test mode so it shouldn't so all right we're redirected back to the success page uh you can see up here in the url we have the id of the checkout session which we used to fetch all of the things what's really cool is we should have a customer id in here somewhere so this is our customer id that was associated with that user um and if everything worked right then we should have saved that customer id in the database so let's go back over to our console thing and try to fetch that from the database so again we're going to require the database thingy initialize a new instance of it and then call get on the key which in this case is going to be the email address wave cgive.dev and again this is db and we need to await it or we can just yeah i don't know then uh console.log value i don't know let's see uh go back over to our shell and run node console again okay so we did get back a customer id that's fantastic so now we have basically we have a database that contains the id of the customer related to that email address this is what we're going to use for authentication let's talk about the send grid part of this so sendgrid has an email api and they have this quick start for node.js and i'll put a link to this in the description of the video and what we see here is like once you've got your send grid account set up you can create api keys for it and those api keys in the case of this example need to be stored in an environment variable called sendgrid api key so i'll come over here and go to our secrets i'm going to add a new api key and this is where i'm going to drop it in so i added my send grid api key uh okay so now what we should be able to do is go back to our files let's follow the guide here we've already verified our sender we're on the right versions blah blah blah blah blah what's really cool about replie is we don't actually have to run this npm install thing it sees like oh if you have a new dependency then it should npm install it so really what we want to do is just grab all of this section and we're going to come up to the top here dump it in and the first part is it's installing the send grid dependency the next part is it's setting our api key using the environment variable we just set then it's creating a new message object with the two and then it's calling sgmail.send for that message um so we can this is like the part that we actually want to put inside of some new billing portal thing so let's create a new route so we're going to say app.post i don't know customer portal and what this is going to do is it's going to send an email to some user's email address so in this case what we want to do is we want to like accept the email from the user um look up the customer in the db uh customer and like if there's a customer object then send them an email like i don't know otherwise like show an error or something i don't know what's going on like when i do double space even in like these web inputs it's adding a period like you know from same sort of situation from imessage i don't know if there was like an update or something to chrome it's very annoying all right so we're gonna accept the email from the from the user input um this is gonna be like const email is uh equal to rec.body so we're just gonna pull it off of the form also like we don't even have a form yet we'll just add another form to index.html that has yet another email and we'll just call this one like customer portal keep it really simple and then instead of subscribing like manage billing or something i don't know that should be fine and then let's just make sure that that is exactly the same as what we have here okay that looks good all right the next step is to look up the customer in the database so again we're going to say like const customer id is equal to oh wait db.get email and hopefully there's a customer id if there's not a customer id then we're going to like respond with i don't know some error message message like unable to find you in the db okay and then we'll return early otherwise if there is a customer object what we want to do is i guess this is the otherwise case if there is a customer object then what we want to do is we want to send them this email so we are going to use the email that they gave us as the to address we're going to use the from address as i don't know wave at cjav.dev sure the subject is going to be manage your billing we don't actually need so text and html so for every email that you receive there is is a possibility that your email client like gmail or outlook or i don't know thunderbird or something is going to be a text only client and like just read the text version of the email or it'll be an html client that can like read the html version of the email i don't even send the text ones anymore like i just assume that everyone's got some super fancy uh email that is modern and doesn't doesn't need the raw text version but whatever it's like a good practice to send the text version to if you've got a big application whatever okay so we're going to send the html contents of the email is just going to be a link and the link is going to be directly to the customer portal um if there is a customer object send them an email with customer portal link okay so in order to create the customer portal link we need to use stripe again we're going to call portal or like session is equal to stripe nope await stripe.billingportal.sessions.create and this is just going to take in the customer id again and the return url and this is why we made that base url thing because it's handy to just come back and say i don't know like we'll just add like i'm back to the query string or something to say that we're we're back and then we want to use this sessions url property as the uh your the link that we're going to send in the email now i'm just going to assume this thing works and if it does then we're going gonna res.send message like check yo email okay stop uh we'll come back over here we're gonna come back to the normal page and why isn't it loading let's see our console uh it's trying to start it's starting npm installed okay so see how it npm installed send grid super convenient okay so now we say uh manage billing we're going to put in wave cgi dot dev which was our customer email that we used don't be confused yeah i used like a couple of the same names and then it says check your email all right so this is the email we received it says manage your billing this came from sendgrid and all it has is this link this link is only gonna last for five minutes but we can email it to them so they can click on it and then see their their customer portal so here they are they've got their email they can like update their plan they can change their plan uh yeah i'm actually i'm a student and i have three of these confirm whatever like now they're now that they're in the customer portal everything's everyone's happy and after they're done going through the customer portal stuff they can say oh i want to return to the demo and they're com they're coming back to the demo and here they see i'm back so uh yeah so that was it was super fun the the send grid api is so simple and straightforward and i had some issues with it with heroku but wow like when you use it directly just create your own account create api keys and then follow their quick start guides it works like a charm uh replit again is yeah humming along great uh today yeah it seemed to seem to like just crank for us so this is awesome and i think that's it thanks so much for watching and hopefully that was useful rachel and if anyone has questions about this or if you want us to make videos about other topics please let us know down in the description and otherwise we'll see you next time [Music] --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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