---
title: Dev Chats - Collecting payments in Ruby on Rails with Pay
slug: dev-chats-collecting-payments-in-ruby-on-rails-with-pay
published_at: 2022-07-20 22:13:12 +0000
updated_at: 2023-01-30 22:52:15 +0000
summary: 
description: In this live session, Chris Oliver joins Cecil and CJ to talk about his open source project called Pay. It's a payments engine for Ruby on Rails applications that makes it easy to integrate with various payment providers. #Stripe #Payments
tags: [ruby, rails, ruby on rails, pay gem, stripe, payments, subscriptions, recurring payments, jumpstart, Chris Oliver, @cjav_dev, @cecilphillip, @excid3]
views: 1263
author: CJ Avilla
url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/dev-chats-collecting-payments-in-ruby-on-rails-with-pay
youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVJq2G19zh0
youtube_id: aVJq2G19zh0
embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/aVJq2G19zh0
thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/aVJq2G19zh0/hqdefault.jpg
type: video
---

# Dev Chats - Collecting payments in Ruby on Rails with Pay

*Published: July 20, 2022*
*Views: 1263*

## Watch

[Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVJq2G19zh0)

[![Dev Chats - Collecting payments in Ruby on Rails with Pay](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/aVJq2G19zh0/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVJq2G19zh0)

## Description

In this live session, Chris Oliver joins Cecil and CJ to talk about his open source project called Pay. It's a payments engine for Ruby on Rails applications that makes it easy to integrate with various payment providers.
#Stripe #Payments

## Transcript

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you know the more i hear that music the more i get so like like i'm dancing in the background it's so funny hey everybody welcome to another dev chats um my name is telco phillip and i have my teammate cj joining me today and today we're going to be talking about something really cool hopefully you guys think it's cool we'll learn how to accept payments in your ruby on rails applications with a really cool open source project called pay which is created by our friend chris oliver here so chris why don't we start off super quick and why don't you tell us who you are and what is it exactly that you do sure um i'm a ruby on rails developer have been for oh i don't know it's been a long time since like 2010 i think um so over the past like quite a few years i started doing some screencasts teaching ruby and rails development and building a few applications out of it and implementing stripe and pretty much every uh actual product and so that led into building a template called jumpstart pro which is a rails app that has payments and other things out of the box and as part of building that i decided to extract and open source the wrapper around the stripe integration which is pay so it's uh that's kind of the high level of um what i've been working on i'm guessing things must be going really well because i notice you got a very big check that's sitting behind you right there yes yeah we had uh i forget when it was so like august or something last year it hit the or maybe it was i can't remember when exactly it was but hit the two million dollar milestone and revenue through stripe which is pretty like just doesn't even really compute it's kind of wild um you know you never really think you're going to make it that that far and then somehow it just keeps growing yeah well you know what i'm sure like everyone that's been using your packages and your services really appreciate it so thank you and i hope you get to find somewhere really cool to put the check maybe on like that right side wall or something like that yeah yeah my new office we moved in like a couple weeks ago and then immediately a week after left for vacation so yeah it's kind of a mess here apologize for that but yeah that stripe check is gonna go somewhere uh in here pretty soon cool well i really want to talk to you about pay your your project but before we do that let's switch over i'm gonna switch over to my screen let's look at some updates about some cool things that have been going on in the world of stripe so first thing i want to talk about today so you know some folks may or may not know about this but we have this really cool project called link and essentially what it does is it allows you to like pre-fill like some of your customer information like you know maybe like their um their address even their credit card information you know if you have them as like you know an existing customer or something like that it's really just like an easy way for them to quickly you know hey i want to buy your product i'm going to click the button pre-fill my information and just kind of get going right like it's it's like having those really quick conversions so i realize a lot of folks don't know we have stuff like this i want to share this document um this is over on our docs if you head over to you know strap.com payment you should be able to see uh you know in the menu bar like something for like you go ahead and check this out um it's really easy to integrate um you know relatively easy to integrate um works well with like payment elements like a lot of other features we have so you know if this is something that makes sense for your projects definitely make sure you check it out now the next thing that i want to talk about uh so one of our community experts um jacob he wrote this really cool blog post about how you can start accepting mobile payments if you're building like react's native applications um and he says we can do it in 15 minutes so i've never written react native so i'm gonna i would have tested it i want to put this to the test and i'm going to try and see if i can do this in 15 minutes not on this show i'm going to do this on my own off camera but you know if again you're a react native developer and you know this is something that you want to do right you want to add payments to your application definitely take a look at this i'll make sure i put the links for this inside of the chat um and we can try and make sure we get those inside of um the description as well so you know if you're watching this video later you can go ahead and check this out too if you wanted to and then the last thing that i wanted to bring to everyone's attention so our uh another one of our community experts orlando um he has a really cool youtube channel um you should head over to his youtube channel landing feedback right make sure you go ahead and subscribe but he has a video talking about um how you can you know use our stripe pricing tables now this is a beta feature so that means that it's not you know it's not turned on for everybody but it's coming soon but it's a really cool way of you know when you have like those tiered pricing models you can give your customers like that visual of hey well these are the different options you have i know in the past a lot of our customers have just been building it manually doing it themselves well you don't have to do it yourselves anymore we'll do it for you um with this new feature that's coming up soon let's with a hot stripe pricing tables so i want to show those with y'all really quick again i'm going to put those inside of the chat for folks that are here and hanging out with us but again we'll make sure those are available in the description so you want to take a look at those later you can go ahead and do that but now now is the part where i always say hey it's no longer our show now this is this is a christian show so we're going to switch over chris we're going to focus on you let's talk a little bit about your your pay project and i guess the best place to start is well why did you why'd you make this thing yeah um you know i think um one of the things that you if you build like an integration with um stripe or any payment provider really you're going to probably do it slightly different every time you build an application and there's a lot of stuff that you need to sync and model in your database and everything so i decided like it might be nice to have a open source package that defined the models the routes the web hooks the you know helpers just to kind of make and simplify the integration so that you don't have to learn hopefully all of the stripe stuff that might be required to for example implement checkout so you can have the you know checkout process happen the web hooks can come in and sync the customer information and the payment method they used and you could use that to like set their default source and everything and um so that was kind of the the idea behind it which was like what if we did the full sort of integration out of the box on top of the stripe library and you can always dive into specific things with the stripe sdk and ruby just like you normally would you just get a little bit of um sort of an abstraction layer to make it simpler and hopefully focus more on like let's just implement the subscriptions and not have to worry about all the little nuances of you know payment methods or whatever it might be so that was kind of the goal of pay and it's definitely evolved a lot version 4 just we just released that like oh i don't remember very recently and um you know it's just been one of those things like iterating on it and you implement web hooks and you realize like oh i can't necessarily trust the data in the web hook right away so i need to actually listen for the web hook pull the information from the api and make sure i have the latest stuff and that's like things that we've done for you so you don't have have to deal with those issues sometimes yeah um you know or maybe you're on black friday and a thousand white book web hooks come in all of a sudden we'll write them to a queue and then process them in the background and your code might actually just accept all the requests and try and do it right there in line so you know trying to include little best practices and things like that to make the integration easier for you and i like what you said earlier is like it provides that abstraction but if you really needed to dive down into that core strike api you still have the option to do that right it's not like you're hiding it it's like an extension and you're just attending to it with like some nice features and best practices to make life a little bit easier for everyone else to try to like consume you know payments inside of the application exactly because that's that's the reality is like you know there are a million different ways to do subscriptions and i don't want to like force you into using some simple things and then oh all of a sudden i have to rip pay out because i can't do some like extra little feature i need um i'm intend it so that it is just you know it's there it does the basics it makes that simple and then when you need to expand on that great just do it you know and awesome so the i don't want it to limit you in any way when when you're integrating it and for for as best as we can that's that's how we've done there's some things where you're like okay well uh we need to we need to create an abstraction which needs to actually limit some thing and so maybe there are certain features that are like yeah if you're going to do that just get pay or whatever but for the most part for your standard kind of subscriptions one time check out even we have like full connect support um so you can do marketplace payments and all of that stuff with it too um you know it's it kind of should do pretty much everything as best as we can out of the box to keep it really simple so so i'm glad you kind of started going on that road you mentioned connects i'm guessing that there's some checkout stuff um web hooks are there any like what are like some of the other features that you'd probably want folks to know about like that that this this job yeah so um the the majority of it started out as we're going to make it kind of seamless when you create a customer you know you might collect a payment method if you happen to send that in we'll go ahead and update that default before we charge your customer we can do subscriptions the subscriptions have all of the new stuff for tax and multiple line items and um you know all kind of as much as that of that as we could support within reason um i know there are some little things that are like uh you know tiered pricing and whatever we don't handle some of the like you know your pricing page or anything like that so we just kind of handle everything behind that so it's kind of limited in that sense that we don't like do the ui and everything for you um yet maybe maybe we will but we've we focused mainly on one time check out subscriptions and then expanded into doing you know stripe tax and um the different types of subscriptions so instead of just having um a kind of netflix you subscribe to a single plan now we have metered billing we have helpers for stripe checkout the billing portal and then all the connect stuff which is actually super cool like when you create a stripe customer with connect pay is going to automatically include the stripe account for every charge and subscription you do going forward so it kind of ties them in your database to the connect account and you don't have to worry about that ever like we're gonna always include those um account ids and everything for you so that it's all handled accordingly so there's the that's the main focus it's mostly for like one time checkout and subscriptions um in in you know sas territory or whatever but we're getting into you know lots of people asking about marketplaces and whatever so that's kind of um where we've been heading in in the future development and stuff for it nice all right so so i'm ready right i gotta see what this looks like we've been talking about this for a long time so why don't you would you mind sharing your screen yeah maybe we could see some demos and see what it feels like and look at the code and learn like how exactly we could use this yeah uh can you see my screen and your screen is up now yes sir cool um so yeah you can find pay on github um i've got a whole folder of documentation that you can read through there's a lot that it'll do we're gonna just focus on a quick demo that's a rails app that has some content that we want to put behind a subscription so um the installation and everything is pretty straightforward you can just hit the install dock and you'll add the pay gem and stripe and if you want to have like braintree or paddle you can use that but we also have our own receipts so if you're if you don't want to use like the receipts that are built into the billing portal or the stripe emails you can use the receipts gem which i also created and it will generate pdfs for you as well if you want to have your like white labeled experience so we're going to go walk through this in a little rails app and let's just go ahead and bundle add pay and stripe and that will add the latest version to pay and stripe to your rails app and install them and then once we install those we'll run the migration command here to copy over the migration file which has all of the models inside of it for your database so if we pull this up this migration is going to create a table to sync our customers from stripe or merchants payment methods subscriptions charges web hooks we don't have every model that you would have you know access to with the stripe api so if you want to like query refunds for example you just do that directly instead of like syncing them to our database we're trying to balance that and keep it simple and not like cover every single thing because that would be pretty hard to maintain but totally yeah chris i'm super curious like how you landed on this specific like modeling like i know some people will store the striped customer id like directly on the user and then maybe they'll only have one subscription that has just the subscription id and status like what kinds of things have you run into uh yeah that has like helped you push your way into this specific you're pulling up some uh some old feelings that i ran into myself where the original versions of pay were like oh go add these fields to your user model but the problem became anytime i need to change those there's no way to like tell the user hey you need to like go change those models um and i actually ended up migrating that stuff to our own pay like prefixed model names because then we can control it and this is effectively the same thing that rails does itself or you know active storage action text they have their own action text models the rich text model and so on so then rails can just provide those other migrations to add other fields or change things as needed and um it doesn't it kind of nicely separates out the developers models and the ones owned by the the library like pay so that was you know it's a combination of like okay this is a best practice if you're building a rails engine that happens to manage models it's probably a good practice to like keep those models separate and then separately or like yeah it's like a completely separate concern like okay this is how you have discovered through four versions that is like the best way to model a sas business or like at least this is the data that you will probably want in your database yeah yeah and that's yeah i would say like going real real fast back to um the database stuff like the paranoia or discard or axes whatever like the soft elite gems like those are ones where you might want to actually put a field on uh the developers models but when it's like all this stuff that's kind of something that will never change but you would as the like library owner it makes sense to separate this out from from their tables and then yeah this has kind of um become uh it's evolved quite a bit because there was a lot of these things that i didn't necessarily um use at the beginning and like for example payment methods we didn't we had one default payment method and that's all we ever saved and so we didn't really need to keep track of anything um but over time people are like hey well why can't i see the other ones why aren't you syncing that and i was like okay well we'll add that table now and um so these have kind of evolved over time of like we did the bare minimum the first version and over time we're like you know what we should probably save web hooks in the database so then we can queue them up to be processed and that's what action mailbox does in rails when you get an inbound email it'll save it in the database table then queue up a job if it fails it's got the you know record in your database still you can retry it and you know do whatever you need to keep track of status or whatever on those so you know these are all kind of things that for the most part are like trying to be the bare minimum of things that you would need without um without being too restrictive so a lot of extra stuff i've started to put in like a json column that you probably aren't going to query on very often but for example on a subscription in the data column we'll now store like the pause behavior so we know like the subscription is active on our status but it's actually paused so we'll have that information there we can add and remove that stuff a lot easier than adding and removing columns so i've kind of like tried to balance stuff we always absolutely need as regular fields and then kind of store the extra stuff in in json columns um we'll see long term if that's a good solution or not but when it comes to something like the pause behavior there's a couple fields and i don't want to add like subscription settings or something for nested um data like that and um so this kind of makes it easier to map stuff um accordingly there um and then the other the other thing with all this too is while we primarily support stripe there is braintree and paddle support and even a fake payment processor for you know testing or whatever so this stuff um kind of has some extra things that might be it tries to be generic across them all but um we have to store like the payment processor name um for each one so if if this is stripe it'll say stripe if it's the fake processor it'll say the fake one and so on um and so there's a little bit of that just to keep it organized on you know when the customer is checking out with stripe here's all their payment methods for their stripe uh customer object but they might have two or three set up and be able to switch between them um and that has just been kind of a a long term feature that i wanted from building go rails like i'll have stripe checkout is the main thing i want to send people to but there are people who don't have a credit card and um at the time i just send them to to paypal and so it was like these two whole separate things and i really wanted an abstraction layer over the top that was like hey here's one you know interface i can use and it doesn't really matter if they chose stripe or paypal we can just kind of have the code written as equivalently as possible it's not always the case because lots of little options um change between them but for the most part you can kind of get away with it for for you know standard checkout or subscriptions or whatever cool so i'm also if we if you'll uh let me ask like um i'm assuming this this um json column type thing is something you would really only need to worry about as a library maintainer because my assumption or my gut is saying like this allows you to like work with json in different database types and things or yeah so we support we support sqlite um mysql and postgres and if you've ever used the json field types across those um as colin and i were working on earlier today uh like they just don't simply don't work the same like the very one of the recent versions of sqlite introduced the like double arrow operator but that's like not available on ubuntu linux by default it's like a version too far they're too early for the long term support release and so what i did here was like the migration is going to check and see hey are you on postgres because if you are let's use the json b column type instead of json and we can kind of you know adapt those as needed um for the most part i think paid doesn't actually query on those but the other benefit of having something like that is you know if you are on sqlite um you can choose how you write the query so that it's compatible with sqlite instead of you know whatever you might need to do in my sequel or postgres which might be slightly different like my sql has the dollar sign dot in the field name but if you do that in postgres then it just returns null so it's kind of like one of those things that if you do start getting into that area of databases and you want to actually be compatible with them you have to spend a lot of time just writing your own little exceptions here and there and that's like a lot a lot of the reason for that is because active record doesn't give you like really strong native tooling for working with json columns like if you want to do a query you have to like write your raw like whatever it's called your where clause or your projection like and then that will be converted into whatever underlying database management system you're using so yeah yeah and we have like in the notice gem like a giant thing that uh we'll check to see which database adapter you're using and then like chooses which um which you know accessor to use to query the data and so it's like something you have to implement yourself maybe eventually could go into an active record but it's one where it's like you know that's something they've got to maintain as the library you know owners and whether or not they want to actually maintain that is up to them and so that's probably why you know this stuff is still in flux like the the feature in sqlite is like uh february or something when it was just out of the double arrow so like it's all still pretty recent for some of these things so um so our one of our folks in the community so steve mcardle steve's here like every week every time we do something so quick shout out to steve but he made this comment um this is why we use [ __ ] and i i had a question in the back of my head now i'm like well how extensible is is pay your paychem i mean can i can i use a different database or whatever the case is like you know can i can i add my own support for mongol or is this something just based on how like the active record inside of rails works yeah i mean we just use active record so uh active record doesn't support [ __ ] so there's not really um you know any support for that i'm sure it's doable there are gems that have like their active record and their [ __ ] support like devised or whatever and it's definitely doable like somebody could make a pull request for that but um we're not really doing anything that would really benefit from that like so it's not really something that makes a lot of sense for for us you know developing pay to go out of our way to support so yeah that makes a lot of sense okay um shall we continue yeah let's do it yeah let's go so um once you know we we got the migration installed and then the next step is really just to add those fields to your database so all of those tables and fields get added um one of the things that we do have you set up is the default url option so that when we create like we're going to use stripe checkout in this example when we create the url for stripe checkout so it can like send you back to your site we'll use this by default in order to generate the right domain so what we'll do is we'll go into you can do this any way you want you can either do it globally in the application rb or i'll probably put it in environments development.rb we can just drop that line here at the bottom and say this is going to be localhost 3000 so that's as simple as that is pretty much just define that and that'll automatically be detected by pay the other thing that i'll point out is that um you'll want to set your stripe api keys and your web hooks signing secret so when um you are using this locally you'll want to use the stripe cli to listen to the web hooks to actually sync over everything just like you would in production and one of those things it's going to print out your web hook signing secret so you're going to want to grab that and you can put them in environment variables so ruby can access them in your env as either the stripe public key the stripe private key and the stripe signing secret and i've already set these up so i'm not going to walk through that but you can check out the docs for how to set that either in your environment like in production or in your credentials for each of your environments just wanted to point that out because i've already set it up didn't want to share those on accident but um those are all good so then the next step of setting up pay is really just to tell it you know what models in my application are going to be signed or associated with a pay a stripe customer or a pay customer um and so we just drop in pay customer into our model and if we go into user.rb we can drop that in here and we can even say default payment processor as stripe and that will skip a step where you can have it automatically create a stripe customer for you and this is one of those features i think that cj uh you worked on if i remember right i'm i definitely asked for it so yeah yeah i can't i think we like paired on it or something but yeah it's like worked on something yeah um because in general you'll have like a user record in your database and you will like say set payment processor to stripe um and that will switch your default payment processor to stripe so whenever whenever you add pay customer it'll add some methods this is the one that you will use first if you don't have this and once you've set a payment processor you can just say hey payment processor let's charge my card or let's subscribe to a plan and so these methods are all added as part of this payment processor and behind the scenes this is actually just an association which is cool it's like a has one payment processor association it returns the pay customer record for that so it's a just like a handy name alias almost to a standard old association that you'd be used to in rails so once you have this you can start thinking about what you want your application to do so let's actually boot up the rails app and open this up in the browser what i've done is i've created a rails app that just has bootstrap it's got device for users we'll sign up real fast and um let's imagine that we're building some you know a go rails or a udemy or anything that might have some content that you want uh customers to subscribe and pay for um so this would be like some secret content it should only be visible you're paying customers and we can create that and we want to hide this and only show that to people who are subscribed so with pay we can go into the lesson show html erb and we can say if the user is signed in and the current user payment processor is subscribed to our application will display the content but otherwise we can print out something like you must subscribe to access this content and we can have a link to some subscribe action and for now we'll just have this as a button that goes nowhere and we'll make that work here in a second so we want to make sure that this is working in hiding that content so in order to make this work what we can do is implement a redirect to stripe checkout they can subscribe and then when they come back to the site they'll have access to everything because all of the web hooks and everything will be handled by um pay for us so um in order to do that what we're going to do is we're going to create a route in our rails app we'll say resource subscription and this will be a simple app where we only have a single subscription um more or less that we'll we'll handle here and so our code for this can be pretty simple we'll go into our controllers and we'll implement that subscriptions controller for these routes that we just added subscriptions controller we want to make sure that our user is logged in so we'll say authenticate user and that comes from divides and we'll just make sure that if you hit this url that you're logged in as an account and that's going to help because we're going to be able to have a user to associate with the stripe customer so then we can have the user in our database connected directly to the customer inside of stripe so we'll have a new action here which is going to create a checkout section and this is some of the stuff that pay does for you so if we have the payment processor we don't need to set it to stripe before we do this because we've already done that on the default payment processor option we set so here we can just simply say checkout we want our mode to be subscription and our line item to be a stripe price so if we go into my stripe dashboard i have a handful of random test subscriptions we can grab the id for this one and paste it in as an example we can redirect our user to the checkout section url we don't really even need this to be a instance variable we'll say allow other host is true because rails is going to now like protect this by default so if you redirect to a separate domain you'll get stopped and you have to pass this option and we're also going to pass the status of c other so that turbo handles that accordingly and while we're at it let's go ahead and set up the billing portal as well so the billing portal section is very similar we'll say portal session and portal section here and this billing portal is all you need to call that will go and generate a billing portal session for you give you the url back and uh you're good to go so with these two controller actions set up our lessons show html erb can link to the new subscription path and if we want to be complete we can also go to our nav bar and we can find like a section in here where you're logged in and we can have a link to the billing portal and this will be the edit subscription path and if we go to our rails app let's just make sure that our stripe cli is working i have had this running and it's been sending requests to our rails app pay has automatically handled this we use this slash pay slash webhook stripe as the default route for all of the web hooks so you'll just want to make sure that they're coming in and returning to hundreds but once that's done oh go ahead oh i was going to say like uh i found it kind of handy to edit the proc file and just drop in like another process that's stripe and then fire up your cli listener so that like any time you boot it up you don't have to forget like or go check like god did i start that thing so yeah and that's like super duper handy the only trick is just whenever your web hook signing secret changes you'll probably get like an error or whatever and you just gotta change that once every 60 days or something it is really nice to put this in your yeah so putting this in your in your profile is definitely the way to go so i think everything is functional so we can uh line items needs to be plural wouldn't be a live demo without something going wrong so line items um this is one of the examples of something that like we handle for you like you um typically it will send line items as an array and you've got to like pass in the price and the quantity and whatever and we have several things set up here that if you give us an array we'll pass that directly over but if you give us something like a string we'll convert it to the array of line items and just kind of simplify the options that you have so your code can be a little bit cleaner and simpler when you're using pay to integrate so let's go back let's subscribe again this is going to take us to our stripe checkout session um we can go ahead and set up our favorite card and subscribe to our brand new application and this will take us back to the home page one of the things that you can do is you can use the session id which will automatically include in the url that that is generated here that's one of the things another one of the many things that pay does for you automatically inject that into the url and we'll use the root url by default so you can use the session id to look it up and actually fulfill like a one-time purchase or if you want to like just sync and make sure that the user's you know subscription has been synced uh because the web hooks will be syncing in the background if they're delayed the user could come to this page and see the subscribe button still so that session id is one way of pay making it easier for you to just guarantee that their subscription was was sent over but because it it worked automatically in the background we are now subscribed and we can see our pro secret content that only paying customers can access and then when we click on billing it'll take us to a subscription edit jump us over to the billing portal um and all of this will give us easy access to like you know invoice receipts and everything where we don't have to implement that which is one of the awesome you know things of the billing portal but one of the benefits here that i want to show is if we were to go in to the customers list and actually do customer support maybe this person said hey you know i accidentally subscribed and i didn't mean to and you've got somebody that just jumps into your your stripe dashboard if you cancel the subscription that will trigger the web hook we will automatically handle it and now they're unsubscribed in the application and you didn't have to implement any web hooks you didn't have to implement any of the syncing everything is done for you there um and also we can jump into like the database and look at the pay customer last and we'll see you know the customers created we do some of the stuff like lazy creating the customers so you can say hey i want to use stripe but we don't immediately uh create the customer just to keep it a little faster so you can like walk through these steps and whatever order that you need but we can then go and say hey what's their subscriptions and you have access to their subscription that is now cancelled and you have access to all of their uh information like the subscription items the metered billing these are things that are going to be unique to stripe that won't necessarily be on the fake processor or paddle or whatever but we give you kind of the data that you probably need because if you're going to be using meter billing you're not going to be using the other payment processors out there because they work totally different if they even support that and generally they won't so um it's kind of expected that it in like some applications if you're going to use a certain billing style you're going to stick to whatever processor and just you know work with that information so some of this stuff is available but isn't going to be like perfectly uh equivalent on each payment processor but this is um you know giving you all of the uh details that you would want if you actually wanted to build your white labeled integrations that's actually what jumpstart pro does and was the reason why i built pay in the first place i didn't want to use well stripe checkout didn't even exist if i remember right when i started and so um you know we're listing out all your subscriptions on our own custom page and generating pdf receipts for you and you know all of that stuff is actually custom and white labeled so you have the ability to you know in a few minutes go implement stripe checkout it's fully integrated but also go from there and build your own white label check out or use our own in jumpstart pro that's done for you and you have all this data in your database you can go and run analytics on it if you wanted to or whatever you might want and all of that stuff is kept in sync so that you know so somebody does an action or stripe does an automatic you know invoice for a subscription that stuff's just going to automatically sync to your rails application using pay and you don't hopefully have to touch any of that it uh should all work out of the box there so yeah that is uh kind of the you know quickest simplest implementation of uh subscriptions i guess i should point out that like one of those things related to the database um the database design that we ended up settling on this was inspired by um by laravel cashier um they allow you to have just like stripe does multiple subscriptions for a single user customer and we gave we give each of those subscriptions a name and so when we in our code we were looking at the lesson show we're already there blah blah blah this subscribe method can take a name and you can give it something else like uh you know team or enterprise yeah and so you can use this to designate the different types of subscriptions you might have so intercom is a good example where they have like you can subscribe to everything or you can subscribe to specific features and you could use this to query those subscriptions based upon like their type or as we call them the name but you can also filter down as well and say processor plan and this would be your price ideas whatever so if you had something very specific you cared about you can have that in there as well and those are like going to default as you see here the name is default by default of course so when you call this without arguments the subscribe method is going to look for a subscription named default or all the subscriptions named default um and so that's you know a little nuance that is really useful to know about you might not quite wrap your head around it if you uh are poking around the database and you're like why why is there a name and why is it always called default uh yeah so so along those lines cecil i don't know if you'll let me like go for it yeah so i'm super curious like your approach or your recommendation around preventing people from accessing stuff that they're not allowed to access like here we're seeing like okay yeah we have a conditional that just checks like are they subscribed in practice would you say you're going to build like a before filter that you apply to certain controllers would you build like a parent controller that's like everything that inherits from this you have to be subscribed would you use like can can can or you know i mean like yeah kind of what would be your favorite sort of approach here to authorization based on subscriptions yeah um it probably depends a little bit on the application um this is an example that like i've used in in go rails for the longest time because it was either i display the video or i don't and the page is still the page so if you paid or you didn't pay you would still come to the same location um so this is like the very simplest version of it where we're like hey just hide the content and that's it if you have areas or sections of the application that are like hey we don't want you to access these unless you're you're paying then yes i would probably take this and i would go into the controller and i would go into the lessons controller and say something like before action require a subscription or something like that and we could just say require subscription and redirect to the pricing path or whatever that might be unless the current user is subscribed and they may or may not have they should actually have a payment processor as stripe but sometimes i'll do the safe accessor here as well um this i don't need to check if the user signed in this would return nil so i can simplify it and say hey if the user's nail then their payment processors probably know and the subscribes probably nil so we can make it all kind of a clean thing here and then um going further yeah if you have something more complex where it's not just a simple are they paying or are they not paying it might be which plan are they paying for um then i would use something like pundit action policy or can can can i tend to prefer pundit or action policy over can can can and the main reason is like it's just ruby classes it's really really simple um there are some added like features and performance stuff and whatever that they've done in action policy to kind of build over top of pundit but pundit is uh like the simplest one to get started with and and you can use that to kind of say like let's find your subscription um and then let's check and see which price you're on or your processor plan um and then say okay you have access to this feature because you're on whatever um whatever plan so it depends on kind of how fine grained you need to be in your like authorization around that but for the most part the the these simple tactics work great if you're just caring whether or not they're paying or not cool um yeah wil willard is like yeah i'm a huge fan of pundit pundit all the way here we got jf so i think like maybe that's uh the community favorite there is defendant the pundit uh yeah pundit jim so um the the one other thing that i wanted to ask about was um when you first migrate the database you've got all these pay tables in there is there a way to like like populate those with data from stripe is there like a rake task or any like helpers that would be like backfill all of my subscriptions or customers um i sort of the problem is that because we associate your like user record with a striped customer we would need that information ahead of time in order to backfill so some of that is easiest to backfill if you have the the stripe customer and user database user association already you know established otherwise like we can pull in the stripe customers but we have no idea who they are so you know and generally that's hopefully going to be a matching on email so it should be pretty straightforward for you we don't have anything for that specifically on the customer side but i don't remember if we had a task in here for syncing other stuff i know we did for syncing payment methods because we introduced that feature and we needed to go back fill all of those payment methods um all of the subscriptions and the charges and most things have a sync method so like a subscription will come in either from you subscribing or a web hook or something happening and we'll just say pay stripe subscription sync give it the id it'll hit the api grab everything it needs grab all the tax stuff and expand whatever fields and so if you wanted to go through the stripe api gather all the subscription ids you could just run them through the the sync methods yourself and that's all uh easily done and accessible so i'll show you an example of this if we go to the stripe charge the sync method is pretty long but you can give it a charge id and if you want to skip the api request you can pass in the object and if if you didn't we'll go retrieve the stripe charge we'll expand the discounts the tax rates we'll include the connect account on there we'll automatically retry if for some reason you get rate limited or whatever the case is and then we'll go through and try and find you know was there a customer if this was a guest charge we don't even sync it it's not really something that pay we may end up doing that in the future like guests check out stuff and recording those but for the most part we're concerned about associating that with an actual customer in your your application um so then we'll go look it up we'll go find the payment method details and we have a bunch of stuff that's like hey you know if it's a credit card we got to go look it up under this key and we'll try and um handle as much as that as possible for you and then grab all the information that is relevant um about you know the charge and we're keeping track of stuff like that payment method that they had paid with we want to make sure like you guys do save the like the information about that payment method because it might be deleted from the user's account and if you deleted that and you're just storing a reference to it then it's gone and you have no history of that payment information so we keep track of some of that even though it's maybe a little bit redundant that's uh good for accountability later on and then we'll go through and you know associate a charge to a subscription because charges um we don't just sync invoices because charges can be outside of an invoice so we have those handled separately if they were related to an invoice syncing all their line items and everything and uh keeping that up to date so you can use this and this is like one of the big pieces of the application just making sure we sync all the information down to those tables correctly and so generally that's like a feature that every model has so in theory if you grab the ids from the api directly you could probably just pipe them through this stuff and it would probably take a long time and you get rate limited but uh you could sweet okay perfect this is super cool yeah this looks awesome so i have to we're running a little bit low on time but i have to ask you super important question before we do anything else and that is so obviously i work with cj you know me and cj teammates and so i've seen him work and i'm watching you work and i have to ask like do all ruby folks use them is that like like i have to ask them absolutely i think uh i would say the majority of them use probably uh vs code these days um but yeah vim i don't know i i spent a lot of time working on servers and stuff and i wanted an editor that was kind of you know always there so i can ssh into a machine and vim's there and you know i also was watching other developers and i spent a while thinking about you know i'm at the computer for however many hours a day how do i be efficient and watching some of my friends go through their editor and they'd like use the mouse and then highlight something and then like delete it and i'm just like like let's just go use the keyboard and not jump between the mouse and everything it's so much faster and whatever and and some of those things i picked up and was like yeah let's let's learn vim because everybody that i've watched like ben ornstein who was really good at them and really fast to the point where sometimes um watching what was it like the uh destroyal software screencast like watching uh gary bernhard yeah he's incredible uh at you know editing text and i'm watching him like i want to be that fast one day so that was kind of the stuff that pushed me to learning vim um and i came from like sublime and used a package called janus for vim that was like a lot of the the keyboard shortcuts from sublime that i could just use in vim and it helped me like actually get up to speed instead of the first few times where you're like i'm so slow this is going in the wrong direction and if you can find the equivalent or like just turn on vim mode and vs code and start there it's not the exact same as real dim but it's close enough and you'll you can pick up a lot of things and still have some of the the helpers in your in your you know gui editor that um and like i'm using mac vim and neo vim works similar i think where you can use your mouse and still use it like a regular editor it's not like you're in your terminal and you can't use your mouse to navigate you get a little bit of those helpers if you uh set it up you know nicely and and try and make it easy for you to do the transition not just go cold turkey into your vim and your terminal but yeah it's uh i don't know like i think it one of the things about them that i think is really powerful and beneficial is like the just the mindset of modal editing like being able to switch between modes if you're if you're editing or like if you're building anything with software a lot like most of your time is actually spent editing and so um i think we also we lost cecil but he'll be back uh so yeah most of the time is spent editing and so the faster you can move around find different files find the right line that you need to change and make the change as quick as possible like for me that's kind of what uh yeah yeah and that that brings up a good point of like have you ever done something that is if you're new to it and and you're not efficient you can like your brain can be five steps ahead of what you're actually doing and when you can optimize editing your code to be as fast as the the solution is coming together in your head and you can get that out onto you know paper or whatever um that is really important for you to just be as efficient as as possible in your in your brain you know solving problems and thinking about like should we even do it this way you can write it out real quick and then be like yeah that's definitely wrong and then you know it it takes a it like you know makes it more fluid i remember like learning to drive a manual um and just being like i i i don't understand like i'm at a stoplight and i can't figure out how to start the car the people behind me are like honking at me and i'm just like this is weird i know what i would normally do and where i would normally be but i'm so slow and it had a lot of like similar feelings to like you know editing and trying to learn vim or whatever and just trying to be uh you know as smooth as possible between your thoughts and what actually is is put out it can be can be like really tough but if you can get efficient at it then you can be way way faster at you know trying new ideas and you know testing things whatever else totally yeah i love the so i i don't know if it was ben orenstein or someone but um there was some talk at some point that was like if you can um if you can navigate your code with your eyes closed then it's like you know then you've sort of like unlocked some really high level of you know being able to edit and move around so like yeah you wanna if you wanna think like okay i'm gonna jump to this controller you should be able to close your eyes command p or whatever your fuzzy finder is type the file name hit enter and then if you know like what line you're going to you can do like a slashed search down for that thing and so yeah yeah yeah and that's something that uh i'm probably gonna do a screencast on soon uh colin and i were talking about like you know when you when you build any feature you are like thinking about it in these different well at least in rails you're thinking about it in models using controllers and helpers and like any given feature is going to span those quite a bit and any of that jumping between like i need to go to the controller and that's in this folder and whatever any of those stop your train of thought of like we need to put this code here and you're now like where the hell is this file what folder is it under and you start to forget some of those things that you were like meaning to do um that just like had come up this week and and uh was like related to kind of how do you organize your code like for the subscription stuff um for authorization like you were talking about earlier like where does that belong because you can put it in the views but you can also put it in the controllers and you can put it and pundit but if you put it in pundit then you have to call pundit from the controllers and the views and you can end up putting the logic for the authorization in one place but you still have all of those separate things that need to talk to that and ask it questions and it's really interesting thinking about you know building features um you know in in any capacity because you have to think about how did all these tie together and how do we actually make it like one cohesive thing um and not spaghetti everywhere um and that's always forever a problem that never goes away totally totally cecil is back i'm back sorry about that welcome back well you'll have to watch the recording uh where chris and i'm talking about yeah i gotta go and catch up on all this stuff [Laughter] so i think we're on time though so so chris i think this was awesome thank you so much for joining us um and thank everyone that's here that has been like hanging out with us so far um if you want to check out pay which i'm hoping all of you will definitely make sure you head over to the github repo what i'll do i get the github repo real quick and i'll put it on the screen for folks that are interested in it but uh definitely make sure you head over to this github repo the link should be at the bottom of your screen right now and then chris i also believe i know you talked about this when i wasn't here but i believe you also have courses too if you could pay forward watch and you know if you want to get up to speed with getting started with taking payment in rails so i'm guessing that's that's an option too right yeah so um there is if you go to courses.gorillas.com there is a stripe there's a payments with rails master class or something and it walks through actually all of the behind the scenes that pay does but doesn't actually use pay so if you want to learn how all that works conceptually that's a really good course for it because using pay abstracts so much stuff there's a lot of little nuances like strong customer authentication and whatever that we walk through every single piece of the way and we would put them in you know the same locations we wrote a lot of that code today you would put all that stuff in there and and more and we do the full like white labeled integration and stuff that um we may cover check out but i don't it may be a bonus or something because the main thing was like let's go implement one-time checkouts with the cart and then let's go do a subscription and talk about all those things what do we need to save and you know what information is important to keep around and query against later on and stuff so that goes through all of that and it's a it's a really good course it was the one that i made and was like man i would happily paid you know 500 bucks for this you know when i was learning the first few times and um so i was like i'm i'm happy to be able to offer that and hopefully save people the same amount of time that i uh wasted for sure awesome well again chris thank you so much for being here um thank all of you for watching and make sure you come back and hang out on our channel subscribe to the stripe developers channel on youtube if you haven't and we're going to have more amazing content more dev chats and more other of our other shows as well so that being said thank you all so much and i'm looking for the funky music so we could get the outro have i found it have i found it i found it found the funky music all right thank you all so much take care and thank you for joining thanks for having me bye bye friends [Music] you

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