--- title: Guest identity verification with Stripe Identity - clearbnb - Part 23 slug: guest-identity-verification-with-stripe-identity-clearbnb-part-23 published_at: 2022-04-01 12:00:01 +0000 updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:13:36 +0000 summary: description: #rails #rubyonrails tags: [cjav_dev, web development tutorials, web development for beginners, vim, ruby, rails, identity, identity verification, stripe identity] views: 1642 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/guest-identity-verification-with-stripe-identity-clearbnb-part-23 youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I-Jc46dW9I youtube_id: 4I-Jc46dW9I embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/4I-Jc46dW9I thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/4I-Jc46dW9I/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Guest identity verification with Stripe Identity - clearbnb - Part 23 *Published: April 01, 2022* *Views: 1642* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I-Jc46dW9I) [![Guest identity verification with Stripe Identity - clearbnb - Part 23](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/4I-Jc46dW9I/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I-Jc46dW9I) ## Description #rails #rubyonrails ## Transcript hey what's up in this episode we're going to talk about verifying a user's identity using stripe identity you're watching part 23 of clearbnb we're building a short-term vacation rental marketplace using ruby on rails we're using tailwind and a whole bunch of different technologies but today we're going to go through and verify the user's identity so stripe has this product called stripe identity it's basically this way that you can you collect documents and verify identities and so there's a couple different ways to do it they have um are we have you have they have there's a modal flow and there is a redirect based flow so the modal flow would be something where we have like you know a modal pops up in the ui and they can go through the process of collecting the documents directly in the ui there's also a redirect based flow which is kind of like stripe checkout which we're already using in the product so i want to use the redirect based flow i i like it uh and i think it's a little bit easier to use and it ends up offloading all of the front end work like writing all the javascript and everything directly to stripe so we're just going to use the redirect based flow today and the way that it's going to work is that when someone goes to a listing and they want to book some property when they click on reserve right now what we're doing is ensuring that they're logged in and then once they're logged in they get to this page i don't even want to let them see actually yeah we want to let them see this page because they maybe they don't even want to book because of the dates so maybe when they click on reserve before we let them reserve will check to see do they have a identity that has been verified and if they have a verified identity then we'll let them continue on to pay for their booking so this is in the reservations controller and when they are going through to create a brand new reservation the first thing we want to do is check to see like check to see if the user's identity is verified and the whole point of this is to give hosts a little bit of peace of mind that the guests that are going to come stay with them have a verified identity and they're not just you know someone who's going to come in their house and uh you know some some stranger that doesn't have any i don't know uh they're on the land or something i don't know maybe their bank robber i don't know um so we just want to make sure that we have a identity verification and we know exactly who is coming as the guest we also want to do it on the host side but we're sort of depending on the um the stripe connect onboarding on that side in order to verify the host which we do uh we do require onboarding through stripe connect for our hosts in order to receive payment and such so what we're going to do now is we're going to see like if current user dot i don't know identity verified uh or if it's not verified then we want to like we want to redirect to uh redir direct through the identity verification flow so in order to track whether their identity is verified or not we need some field in the database so rails g migration add identity verified to users and that's going to say something like identity verified verified and it's going to be a boolean and false i don't know is that going to let me create a field with all of that special stuff yeah okay that's it's not the index it's the default value and let's see so we're going to come in here and default to false so all users by default have not had their identities verified we'll migrate the database and then we're gonna pop open that um yeah so back to the reservation controller and inside of the reservation controller when we're creating this um when we're creating this reservation what we wanna do is we want to push the user through the identity verification flow so the way this works is we create a verification session and then we redirect to that url so the type of identity verification we're going to do today is document verification we'll put in the user's id so this is just going to be current user.id is there anything else that we might want to check here i don't know like yeah that's probably good like uh for now we're gonna be able to respond to web hook notifications about different steps of the verification process so we'll know when the user's identity is verified we'll be able to look them up based on the metadata that is stored in this verification session but before we get too far let's just take a look at the api ref for this and see what else we could pass in so you can verify documents or you can also identify do id numbers so social security number things like that we can also like require that you know they have to use a passport or driver's license or things like that um okay and then finally we want to pass in a return url i'm so okay yep so we want to pass in a return url and that's going to be the url to which we want to redirect the user back to after they complete the verification process and that url is going to be the url that we're currently on right now and i'm wondering if we want to like somehow include the check-in and checkout dates when we come back i don't know we'll keep it simple for now but yeah in the future we might want to do something fancy but let's see so this is going to be the the new reservation um url and we want to include the listing id in the query string param now i don't know if we're passing the listing id as a inside of the reservation params we are okay so notice that we have a hidden field here that has the listing id 26 and that is also like it's originally when the new form is loaded we're passing it at the top level params but when the form is submitted it's going to be submitted in reservation params so i think we can come over here and say something like reservation params listing id and then here we want to redirect to the verification session.url and because this is a another host we have to say like allow other hosts true and status is c other and if we are doing identity verification here we want to return early so we're just going to like add a little early return because we don't actually want to book the listing if yeah if we need to go through verification so the next step is that we also need to know when we have completed identity verification or like the whole process so let's go take a look at these so that's the redirect flow blah blah blah we go through the redirect flow and after we are done with the flow we want to call actually what do we what is this javascript for oh that is just uh yeah okay um okay and test to redirect blah blah okay handle verification events so if their identity is verified this is the event type that we're going to receive identity verification session dot verified so we'll go over to our web hook handler and again this is every time we receive a web hook it's being handled by an event job so we go into the event job every time we have an event that's a stripe event we're calling handle stripe so inside of handle stripe we're going to add a new thing in here so we're going to say something like when um let's what was it again identity verification session verified so when the verification session is verified we want to look up the user so the session is going to be like event data object that's the verification session and we're going to find the user by their id so user.find yeah find buy id we want to use find buy in this case because we don't want it to raise an exception because uh we don't want our web hook handler to return a 404 in the case that for some reason the session that came back in the web hook handler did not have the metadata with the user id in it um so yeah there's two alternatives here right you can say like user.find and then just try to pass in the id like that but if there's a if if there's no user found and we're using this method by default the controller is going to respond with um a 404 actually you know what it shouldn't matter because we're in a background job yeah we're in a background job so it shouldn't matter but whatever and now we can say like if user.nil raise there's no user found without id otherwise what we want to do is we want to say user dot update identity verified as true and on this verification session verified event it's going to return or it's going to like send us a verification session which um let's see verification session i don't know why it's in dark mode i didn't i don't think i turned that on okay so verification session is going to have all of this fun stuff if there was an error it'll have that verification session error and then it'll have this status of verified so we can also like double check that but when we receive this event it should be it should be verified but we'll just be careful we'll say if session.status is verified then update the user's identity to verified uh otherwise we'll set it to not verified i don't know that should that shouldn't happen um okay what other event types were there here requires input that's going to be like a step where the user needs a little bit more information before they can be fully verified and in our case we're just going to every time they try to book we'll just push them through the verification flow again so if we come back over to clearbnb and attempt to book now we have our webhook handler is up and listening so we should be able to i think we're going to get kicked out or like not kicked out but we should uh be sort of blocked here from attempting to book these dates because our identity is not verified so from the 11th to the 12th when we click on reserve we should get redirected through the identity verification flow and we did awesome so this is the um the identity verification process uh we're going to go through like this test success thing eventually but if we want to just preview the experience we can proceed and then we can say complete it on the mobile device and that'll let us go on sort of on our phone and try to take a picture of some some identification or we can say get started and we'll say like take a picture with your webcam and let's say it's a driver's license um okay very good accept and continue now we need to allow our camera and i don't know if the camera is going to freak out because of uh the i don't know if it's gonna freak out because i'm recording at the same time but whatever we'll see so then if we say continue now let's pretend like this is my id and uh it's gonna say um so it's you'll notice like at the bottom here it says place the front of the id document above this thing it's capturing the image but it's not a real id this is a remote control so i don't want to show you my real id because of people and uh yeah so whatever we're just gonna say try again and then use other options upload images you can upload images too that's like another option but um let's actually go all the way back to verification success so we're going to submit the this is in test mode we can just say like it was successful um and so we'll say submit and we should receive a web hook so we should have received identifi okay here we go identity verification session verified and if we look in here if we look at the rails console um we should see which user was this what are we logged in as i don't know reservation.lab uh oh no it's not gonna be right okay so then we have to go back to clearbnb and now we have to re-pick those same dates but um yeah i don't know user.where identity verification are verified true hey there is a verified okay so this one has a verified identity that's fantastic all right so now if we come back in here and we say book from i don't know what was it 11th to the 12th of april it's like right around my anniversary and we'll say reserve now we have a verified identity we're being redirected through the checkout flow so now we're going to like go pay for this booking and i don't know maybe we're going to go somewhere super fun that would be cool okay yep sure blah blah blah test test test book suite and it's processing it's processing um oh also we have it set up so that it's gonna send us emails and text messages and all kinds of notifications letting us know that it's all set up and ready to go so that was pretty quick and pretty straightforward i haven't done this in uh in a little while so um yeah i'm happy with how quickly that went we have now a reserved reservation and we have a verified identity for the guest before they arrive and that totally checks off this box i'm just gonna say that um we'll save background check phone number check for another um another time maybe an exercise for the reader but honestly i'm feeling like we might actually be done building this out like i'm feeling pretty confident if there's any like really major major features that you want to see or other kinds of tools that you want to use with rails please let me know i'm going to add them to a list for another series this one is getting a little bit tired this is part like 23 or something of the series so we'll we'll keep doing real stuff we'll keep doing uh things with ruby and javascript but i want to mix it up a little bit and start working on another project so um yeah let me know what kinds of features you are trying to add to your rails applications and we'll see if we can fit them in and make some content about it so thank you so so much for watching thank you so much for all of your time and attention this has been really fun to build out i know it's like not fully complete the intention was never to like actually launch this as a real proper thing but it was to go through and really exercise a bunch of different muscles in terms of what kinds of things we're doing so it's got you know listings we can add listings remove listings we're dropping pins on google maps we can look at uh reservations here we can book reservations we can sign up as hosts we have listings that we can create we've got address autocompletion with stimulus js we're using tailwind it's it's got like a pretty it was pretty fun to build this out so um yeah thanks so much if you've been sticking around this whole time really appreciate it and uh yeah if you haven't already connected i would love to chat with you on twitter at cgive dev and otherwise yeah thanks again so much for your time and attention and we'll see you in the next one [Music] --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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