--- title: Go net/http Starter slug: go-net-http-starter published_at: 2021-03-18 17:00:05 +0000 updated_at: 2023-01-30 22:53:43 +0000 summary: description: In this edition of Stripe Developer Office Hours, follow along as CJ Avilla walks through the fundamentals of setting up a basic web application with the net/http go lang package. ## Resources - net/http https://golang.org/pkg/net/http/ - curl command line tool https://curl.haxx.se/ - dotenv https://github.com/joho/godotenv - Stripe Webhooks Guide https://stripe.com/docs/webhooks/build - Stripe Event Types https://stripe.com/docs/api/events/types - Code: https://github.com/stripe-samples/developer-office-hours/tree/master/starter/server/go-http ### Presenter CJ Avilla, Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ### Support If you have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team at https://support.stripe.com/ or join us on Discord https://stripe.com/go/developer-chat. ### Feedback What would you like to see in future episodes? https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScx_BtXcakIJ_EFso-4-fnCrTVFXxsh-5BPM-SdhNG6W7kzbw/viewform #Stripe #Payments tags: [stripe, stripe-go, golang, go, net/http, http server, web server, Getting started with a web server in go, How to setup a http server with go, Getting started with Stripe and Go lang, @cjav_dev] views: 2129 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/go-net-http-starter youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQWEJV2tR-c youtube_id: JQWEJV2tR-c embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/JQWEJV2tR-c thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/JQWEJV2tR-c/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Go net/http Starter *Published: March 18, 2021* *Views: 2129* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQWEJV2tR-c) [![Go net/http Starter](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/JQWEJV2tR-c/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQWEJV2tR-c) ## Description In this edition of Stripe Developer Office Hours, follow along as CJ Avilla walks through the fundamentals of setting up a basic web application with the net/http go lang package. ## Resources - net/http https://golang.org/pkg/net/http/ - curl command line tool https://curl.haxx.se/ - dotenv https://github.com/joho/godotenv - Stripe Webhooks Guide https://stripe.com/docs/webhooks/build - Stripe Event Types https://stripe.com/docs/api/events/types - Code: https://github.com/stripe-samples/developer-office-hours/tree/master/starter/server/go-http ### Presenter CJ Avilla, Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ### Support If you have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team at https://support.stripe.com/ or join us on Discord https://stripe.com/go/developer-chat. ### Feedback What would you like to see in future episodes? https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScx_BtXcakIJ_EFso-4-fnCrTVFXxsh-5BPM-SdhNG6W7kzbw/viewform #Stripe #Payments ## Transcript [Music] in this episode we cover foundational topics and dig into the basics of using go and the built-in http package how it works and how we use http when creating video tutorials like this one and also in the striped samples a collection of github repositories demonstrating integrations with many different stripe products so you may be just getting started and are curious about how to build an application from scratch to take your first online payment now if you already have a back-end set up and are comfortable adding new routes and you're just looking to add a stripe integration you might want to check out the other videos on this channel where we show how to integrate specific stripe products and features all right so why http so the the net http package is uh the foundation for building web apps in go it exposes a bunch of helpful methods for routing and working with request and response objects and this allows us to keep the code for a demo concise while also showing a working example so if your app is written with a more feature rich web framework like maybe bigo or something like that the same fundamentals apply but are implemented a little differently across you know bigger more opinionated code base such as that it may be helpful to watch and refer to two other videos before watching this one the first is about managing environment variables with go and the second is the introduction to the stripe cli we'll have links to these and other helpful resources in the description as a quick agenda for today we'll cover how to set up a basic client with a static html file and stripe.js installed how to install your dependencies with go we're going to use go modules how to implement a basic server.go file and add get and post routes and also how to add a post route for your webhook handler to start we'll create a client and server directory the client will have a single html file and the server will start with just server.go so let's jump right in and add some basic html in this index.html file we'll just add some rough structure and a little helper css file in almost all stripe samples or video tutorials for the web we're going to install stripe js note that you always want to load stripe.js directly from js.stripe.com now in some cases we'll write front end javascript directly in line to keep the content front and center in other cases we might use a script tag to include a javascript file from our project we'll need an instance of the stripe object on the client in order to work with stripe.js which we can create by calling this constructor function and passing in our publishable key you can find your publishable key in the stripe dashboard it's totally fine for purely web-based projects to hard code your publishable key directly on the client but if you're working with mobile applications it's recommended that you fetch the publishable key from the server so that versions of your mobile applications aren't tied directly to a specific publishable key so if you need to roll your key you don't have to ship new installs so as an example of how to make a get request to fetch some data from the server we'll request we'll make a request to receive the publishable key and we'll set it right here in just a bit so let's turn now to the back end and in this episode we're going to use go modules for managing our dependencies so first we need to run go mod init and we'll pass it just stripe.dev samples as sort of our package here so from now on any time we run any of the built-in go commands like build or install or test the go tool chain will fetch and resolve dependencies automatically for us based on our import statements all right let's open server.go and dive in so this is the main package we're going to add this main func as an entry point all right cool let's also import format for printing to the console and stripe go to uh get started initially we'll print a little hello world and set our stripe secret key note that for each package we want to use within the stripe go library we'll need to add import statements for each so for instance if we're working with customers we'd add customer same idea for prices let's try to make an api call to stripe for something simple like listing prices price.list returns an iterator then we can iterate through the results and print the id of each price run this file with go run server.go and let's take a look at the results we see a list of all these price ids are being printed out from our stripe account and they're streaming out here to the terminal which tells us that we're able to successfully make api calls to stripe so in the stripe samples we load the stripe api keys from environment variables and we use these dot end files we have an episode all about working with environment variables in go so check that out if you're curious about the details but for now we'll just import the os module for retrieving environment variables and go.m to load our api keys from the dot m file rather than hard coding that secret key string so we'll create a new m file in the server directory note that you may need to copy a dot end.example into your server directory it might be in the root of the sample um so now we can use go.n to load the end files variables and use those to set our secret key confirming this works by making another api call to stripe alright cool looks good next we're going to add a simple hello world route to get the web server set up so first we need to add the net http package and we'll call listen and serve it's kind of like protect and serve and we'll pass in the address we want to bind to and we'll pass nil as the second argument since we're going to rely on the default handler which is default serve mux next we need to actually add a route which we can do by calling handle func on http and passing in the path that we want to match and a function with the logic to execute when receiving that request so the function receives two arguments the response writer and a pointer to the request we can use the format package here to just write out us the simple hello world string when we receive a get request to the root route when we start the server this time the operating system prompts us to make sure that we want to allow incoming requests then we can hit the root route with a simple curl request to localhost 4242 and we see our plain text response awesome so typically we'll handle requests to the root route by responding with the html page in our client directory instead of using handle func we'll switch to use handle and we'll use the http dot file server with the path to the client directory so we're going to pass in dot slash client because we want to go up and over to the client directory now when we make a curl request to slash we receive back the html for that index page and from the browser we can load the same page and we see the html that we have we scaffold it in the beginning now depending on how a stripe sample is installed the path to the client directory might differ so we typically load that from environment variables also okay let's add another route or end point to the server to receive get requests and respond with the publishable key or public key since we're working with json we'll import the encoding json package so this and all other routes will typically use http.handlefunc and we'll pass in the path we want to match on and the name of some function to execute we try to follow the convention where the handler's name starts with handle so now we can we can go define handle public keys to ensure this only responds to get requests we can add a simple check for the requests http method and respond with an error if we receive requests other than gets next we'll set the content type of the response to application json and we need some sort of struct with the shape of the response this can be either done inline or you can use some like predefined type that you specify somewhere else and finally we're going to use the json package to create an encoder with the response writer and then encode or serialize our struct data to json response body all right let's test again with curl all right great we're now seeing some well-formed json in the response so in many samples we're going to extract this logic out uh for rendering as struct as json and also doing a little bit of error handling where we set the http status code and we write this in a method called write json so i'm just going to drop this here but just know that the extra code here is purely to add logic for rendering error messages which we're not going to cover in detail today all right now let's see how we can access this server side data from the front end with javascript we can use the browser's built-in fetch method for making an ajax request to this new endpoint fetch takes the path or a full url to which it should send a request and then it returns a promise that resolves with an object and that object has a json method which also returns a promise that ultimately contains the json object returned from the server cool so from the browser we can open the developer tools and look at the sources tab where we'll see the front end code that's executing i like to add break points by clicking on a line number in the gutter and hovering over the various objects to see what their values are at various points so you can use these these buttons to step through or continue execution with that play button all right this looks great and shows how to make a get request from the browser to our server let's add one last bit for taking the public key off of the response and using that to initialize the instance of stripe cool all right so next we're going to add a new route to the server that will accept post requests with the data passed in from the front end so again this is going to use handle func to define the path we want to match on and we'll pass in the function name for handling this post route so we'll define the new function and we'll check to ensure that the http request method is post most most samples are going to pass in json from the front end and that will be unmarshaled or deserialized here and into an object we can more easily work with so we're going to need some struct type with the structure of the json that we're deserializing and often we're going to define these types outside of the handler with the properties of the json we expect to be passed in from the front end so in this case let's take in the name and email for this example all right next we're going to unmarshal the request body into an object where we can print and work with it and just kind of like return the same object in the response all right so if we poke at this endpoint with curl and we use you know slash create customer we're going to specify the dash d command now and pass in this json string with a name and an email and you'll notice that the endpoint is simply echoing back the same request body if we look in the server logs we see that name was printed in the logs that in practice this could pass back the id of a newly created object or a database record by convention again a post request is going to create some instance all right finally let's take a look at how to make post requests from the front end to this new api endpoint so that we can pass data collected from customers to our server so let's collect the name with a text input and add a button just for submitting the data we'll grab reference to the button and add a click handler that says when the button is clicked well let's make a post request again using the fetch method available in the browser this time we need to specify though that the that is a post request and that we're sending application json and we're passing some data in the body of the request so it's in this request body where we can specify the data that we want to pass to the server in this case the value entered into the name input so now when we click the button the name is passed to the server we can see tony in the logs but no email since that property wasn't passed we didn't really collect or add an input for email to wrap up our basic sample we'll add another route for handling webhook notifications in this case we're receiving post requests directly from stripe and we have episodes all about webhooks so head over to the stripe developers channel to see those in action but we're going to start by referring directly to the stripe documentation and it's at stripe.com docs slash web hooks slash build and notice this snippet is using handle func similar to our other routes but it's passing an anonymous function so let's copy just that function and we'll rename it to handle webhook to match our existing structure and then we'll pop in the handle func into our main great now we can talk through each of these bits so the first half of this function is to safely read in the request body and deserialize it into a stripe event object so if the request was read successfully and the event is unmarshaled without error then we can switch on the events type and automate logic for things like pulling from inventory sending customer emails or printing shipping labels each event has the same high level structure but an inner object that will vary based on the type of the event because the underlying object could be a payment intent or a customer or really any other type of stripe resource we need to further unmarshal the raw data for the object that is into a specific stripe go type so that we can access properties of that object at the end of this function we just return with the 200 status code back to stripe so this is how the starter was built and how we build samples with go and with the http module thanks so much for watching if you're interested in seeing more content like this or to help build and maintain your stripe integration consider subscribing and liking this video as it helps others find the content if you have any feedback please let us know by 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