--- title: Making requests with stripe-node slug: making-requests-with-stripe-node published_at: 2020-12-29 11:00:10 +0000 updated_at: 2023-01-30 22:54:00 +0000 summary: description: Learn how to make requests to the Stripe API using the stripe-node client library. You'll see how to format parameters and pass request body, query string params, and request headers. ### Presenter CJ Avilla - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ### Resources Official client library: https://github.com/stripe/stripe-node Code: https://github.com/stripe-samples/developer-office-hours/blob/master/2020-10-30-client-libraries/node/demo_requests.js ## Table of contents 00:00 Overview 01:16 API reference 04:10 Create an object passing no params 05:15 Retrieve single object 06:06 Create an object with scalar values 08:11 Create an object with enum values 11:53 Create an object with nested object 13:37 Create an object with a list of strings 14:57 Update an object with scalar values 16:36 Update an object with a list of nested objects 18:55 Retrieve a list of objects 20:10 Retrieve a list filtered by scalar 20:53 Delete an object 22:32 Custom methods overview 23:31 Custom method demo 26:23 Nested service method overview 26:53 Nested service method demo 28:55 Request headers overview 30:00 Request headers demo 31:40 Conclusion ### Support If you have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team on Discord at https://stripe.com/go/developer-chat. ### Updates Sign up to stay updated with developer news: https://go.stripe.global/dev-digest ### Feedback If you have any feedback about this or other episodes, let us know: https://forms.gle/VjNqzRhotM2snYo88. #Stripe #Payments tags: [stripe, payments, stripe-node, node, javascript, API, Stripe API, client libraries, sdk, @cjav_dev] views: 5347 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/making-requests-with-stripe-node youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ayi6wohGkc youtube_id: _Ayi6wohGkc embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/_Ayi6wohGkc thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/_Ayi6wohGkc/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Making requests with stripe-node *Published: December 29, 2020* *Views: 5347* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ayi6wohGkc) [![Making requests with stripe-node](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/_Ayi6wohGkc/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ayi6wohGkc) ## Description Learn how to make requests to the Stripe API using the stripe-node client library. You'll see how to format parameters and pass request body, query string params, and request headers. ### Presenter CJ Avilla - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ### Resources Official client library: https://github.com/stripe/stripe-node Code: https://github.com/stripe-samples/developer-office-hours/blob/master/2020-10-30-client-libraries/node/demo_requests.js ## Table of contents 00:00 Overview 01:16 API reference 04:10 Create an object passing no params 05:15 Retrieve single object 06:06 Create an object with scalar values 08:11 Create an object with enum values 11:53 Create an object with nested object 13:37 Create an object with a list of strings 14:57 Update an object with scalar values 16:36 Update an object with a list of nested objects 18:55 Retrieve a list of objects 20:10 Retrieve a list filtered by scalar 20:53 Delete an object 22:32 Custom methods overview 23:31 Custom method demo 26:23 Nested service method overview 26:53 Nested service method demo 28:55 Request headers overview 30:00 Request headers demo 31:40 Conclusion ### Support If you have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team on Discord at https://stripe.com/go/developer-chat. ### Updates Sign up to stay updated with developer news: https://go.stripe.global/dev-digest ### Feedback If you have any feedback about this or other episodes, let us know: https://forms.gle/VjNqzRhotM2snYo88. #Stripe #Payments ## Transcript the stripe api is organized around standard restful conventions it uses those standard http requests and responses with predictable resource oriented urls request bodies are form encoded and responses are json encoded http requests you make can send data to stripe servers in one of three parts of the request in the request body this is where you pass parameters to create update and take specific actions on objects so for instance if you're creating a customer the customer's email address might be something that you pass in the body of a post request http headers which is where the configuration like api key and api version are sent you know in our docs will often refer to the arguments as request params there's also query string params most often used for filtering lists with get requests in this video you'll learn how to format request parameters so that you can effectively work from the api reference to make most requests and build almost any supported stripe integration the api reference is the detailed documentation about each resource cataloging the supported parameters some sample requests and responses generally when building an integration you'll follow an official guide but may need some specialized params to solve for your specific use case on the left you'll find a list of resources expanding customers shows which api endpoints are available for working with customers under the customer resource we see the customer object and methods for creating retrieving updating deleting and listing customers the customer object describes the shape and attributes of an instance of a customer that's returned in the responses from the stripe api you'll notice that some attributes are marked with the expand label we'll cover the expand feature of the api and how to work with it from client libraries in more detail in another episode however i just want to show that this is how from the api reference you can tell which attributes are expandable the create a customer api endpoint describes the parameters sent to the stripe api when creating a customer on the far right side we see a code snippet example with some basic params note that you can switch from curl to the stripe cli or any of our officially supported client libraries to see a basic code snippet in the programming language you're most familiar with in the next section of the api reference we'll see details about making a request to create a customer these are the parameters that can be sent in the post body to the stripe api to create customer objects the most common parameters are listed at the top and then additional or more advanced parameters are included below under the more parameters subheading if your account's default api version is older than the latest version then you might also see a panel with information about breaking changes released in a newer api version note that all parameters for creating a customer here are optional if we look at the create a payment intent reference you'll see a label showing that the amount and currency parameters are required in some cases parameters might be conditionally required as is true for off session the values for these parameters or the arguments can be scalar values objects arrays of objects or arrays of strings sub-objects or child parameters can also be deeply nested as is the case with shipping address some params might be enum values like tax exempt which accepts none exempt or reverse in this episode we'll cover how to construct the arguments passed to the client library so that you can be confident in passing scalar values or more complex parameters like lists of nested objects so i've created a file called demorequests.js with stripe node imported in my api key set let's start with a very simple request to create a customer but with no params so i'm just going to say create a customer with no params here and i'm going to set this equal to a new variable called customer i'm going to use a weight and say stripe.customers.create and i'm not going to pass it any arguments and then we'll just log customer okay so over here on the left side i'm going to run this with node demorequest.js and this will execute our api call and print out the customer to the terminal so in the terminal output you can see the customer object returned and the attributes that are populated for you by default if we wanted to fetch this single customer later on we could do so by making a get request with this string id to fetch the customer so let's comment those out and we'll just say fetch a customer and here we'll do the same thing await stripe.customers.retrieve and this time the retrieve method is going to take in an argument and that argument is just the single string id i'm actually going to rename and use cus as the variable name so that we can see the full method here when you're looking at the video so if we want to we can console log this customer again and if we rerun this code you'll notice that the json is exactly the same and that is coming back with the same data that we just created or the same customer the data for the same customer that we just created earlier okay all right so let's spice things up a bit and create another customer this time though with a name and email address so we're going to say create customer with scalar values and this is going to look something like this say cons cust is equal to await stripe.customers.create and then this is going to take in a json object javascript object here where we pass in email is jenny.rosen example.com and the name is just jenny rosen okay so this is passing passing this argument the first argument to create here this json argument will allow stripe node to send those to send that data in the post request body we'll just log customer again and print this out so when we execute this we'll see that again we're able to log out to the console a customer object here and you can see the name and you can see the email address of the customer and that's um so that's great so now we're sending some data to the stripe api with stripe node which is creating this customer object and returning it to us again the straight api expects parameters to be passed as form encoded data in the post body not as json so the response is json but the request is form encoded as a form encoded string so the above here would result in this sort of request body which would be email equals jenny.rosen example.com ampersand and then name equals jenny percent 20 rosen to to show like sort of the space right so this is the form encoded data this is what is being sent in the post body now the stripe node client library is abstracting this away so that you don't have to think about it but it's something to keep in mind if you're going to attempt to make requests outside of the context of the client library that's just to keep in mind so it turns out that some scalars accept specific enum values so the tax exempt parameter on customer accepts one of none exempt or reversed so let's say await stripe.customers.create tax exempt and here we want to pass in one of the supported possible enum values i'm just going to console.log cuss.tax exempt this time so that we can see that this was returned okay so this is showing none um other other valid arguments here is like reverse is uh is one of the the valid options but if we pass an invalid value for this enum then you'll see that the api request fails and we get a 400 http status response from stripe and right now the promise is being rejected since we're not handling any errors so if we add a try catch here and we um just console.log the error you'll see what's happening here all right so if we run this again you'll see that the the status code for the response was indeed 400 this was a failed request and the error message that we get in the response is here message and it says invalid tax exempt must be one of none reverse or exempt so it's telling us that this is a we tried to make a request with an enum value and it was invalid so this is uh let's say create customer with enum value okay let's also see what it would what it would look like to pass in another invalid value here so this time we'll pass an invalid parameter name so we saw above that email is the correct parameter name for creating a customer with an email address jenny rosen example.com however if we were to change this from email to email underscore address then this is also an invalid parameter because it's not email it's email address so let's see what happens when we run this so again we get an error and we're catching that and we're handling it with our try catch block but this time the error message will show us that we received an unknown parameter email underscore address so the most common reason for this error that you'll see is number one that the name of the parameter was mistyped so either was misspelt or uh just just usually it's just some mistyping of the name of the parameter or maybe it might be like nested under the a different child parameter or set of child parameters but it's also a possibility that the api version you're using is different so this is something to keep in mind as you're working through building out and making requests that if you get this received unknown parameter that those are two things that you want to check out is is the api version you're using correct and was it actually correctly typed so i'm gonna i'm just gonna add a comment here that's like make a request with invalid params and then we'll just comment that out all right so let's up the stakes yet again and add some data or send some data when we're creating the customer that's nested inside of a child object so here we're going to say like create a customer with nested object okay so we're going to say like cust is a weight strive.customers.create and here we'll say at the top level we're going to pass a payment method and that's going to be a scalar value for pm card visa and we'll talk about pm card visa in just a moment then we also want to pass invoice settings which itself is not a scalar value but instead it is an object so this is a nested set of parameters that we can pass when creating a customer and this invoice settings one of the params we can pass with invoice settings is called default payment method and again i'm going to pass pm card visa and we'll just console.log this and see what that looks like okay so now we are seeing that there an object is being created if we scroll up we can see that the invoice settings here is set and it does have a default payment method here that was created for us coming back to this this magic string pm card visa it's one of the test payment method ids if we pass this at the top level it's going to attach the payment method to the customer and then if we pass it inside of invoice settings default payment method we have to do both of these then our resulting test customer can successfully make recurring payments again in test mode for a billing subscription and other invoices so this can come in handy if you're building a billing integration you want to test some things out some parameters accept lists of strings so when creating a customer one of the things you can specify is a list of preferred locales so let's let's do this again await stripe.customers.create preferred locales and this is going to be a list of strings where we have english and spanish okay so this is how you would pass a list of strings when making an api request so let's run this again and we can see now that the preferred locales for this newly created customer has english and spanish this is how you pass a list of strings so i'm using async await which allows me to write the code in a way that reads very step by step in line by line but the stripe node client library also supports execution or promise style execution so we can say stripe customers create.then and pass a callback function where we could console.log the result okay so now that we've created several customers let's see how we can update an existing customer the concepts from earlier around how to structure the params are going to apply however we're also going to need to pass the id of the object we want to update so for all objects in the stripe api they all have a string id customer ids start with that cus again and so we're going to pass that as the first argument to the update method and then the second argument is going to be an object with the parameters for updating the customer so we're going to say again we're going to create a cusp variable here again we're going to use a weight stripe.customers.update and this time the first argument is this json object or the the string id and the second argument is the json object representing the params that we want to send when updating the customer so let's update the email address of a customer so we're going to say email is jr example.com and what's console.log custom email here so we're going to update the email address for a customer and let's see what this looks like we run this and we get back jr example.com let's also log out the id of the customer so that we can see that it's not changing so we'll run this again and we see the id of the customer that matches the id of the customer we're updating let's now change the email address to jr2 at example.com and now we see that in the result so that's how we can update the customer and update their email address we can also follow the same pattern for updating nested objects and other patterns of parameters when updating customers so let's update a customer with with some nested object data so we'll say const cuss is equal to await stripe.customers.update first argument again is the id of the customer we're going to update the second argument is a json object in this case we're going to pass in invoice settings and we've in the previous example we passed a default payment method which had a scalar value but this time let's pass custom fields which is itself an array of objects and those objects each have a name and value so a common use case here is for taxes so we're going to say that is the name of the custom field and the value is 123abc and we'll just console.log this and run that super handy and um you'll notice that this is even it's nested so deeply that the console.log isn't printing this out so let's print custom invoice settings to get a better sense of what this looks like and you'll see here that custom fields is a list of json objects right now it just has one with the name that in the value one two three abc it turns out this was a workaround for getting tax ids on to invoices particularly for customers in europe but recently the the invoices team shipped support for merchant and account level tax id so at your in your stripe dashboard you can go in and set tax ids that will show up on invoices but this is one great example of how you can pass in a list of objects and those json objects will be again completely serialized into this form encoded the form url encoded post body and sent to update this specific customer so that's how we can update a customer with nested object data so we can make a get request to fetch a page from the list of customers with the list method so here we can say something like const customers is equal to a weight stripe.customers.list and then we can just console.log all of the customers um and actually let's also uh just so that we can read this a little bit easier let's say console.log customers.data which is the actual array of each instance of the customer and we can say map c and we'll just print out like c to id and that should be more interesting than uh than just seeing some json the the bottom of some json so here we get 10 customers back um so we got the the json for 10 different customer objects so stripe node supports auto pagination which is a super handy tool for working with lists so there is an episode all about pagination where we go through list endpoints and how they support limit ending before and starting after these are all options that are covered in the pagination episode so highly recommend going to check that out but something i wanted to show is that we can filter the list of customers uh so this is like fetch a list of customers um we can also filter a list of customers uh by passing in an email address so one of the options for the list endpoint for the customer list api is to pass in an email address so if we pass in the email for jenny.rosen at example.com it's a really common example or demo email address that we use and then if we just console log the id of the customer and the email of the customers i think that you'll see yeah so in stripe each customer object has a unique id here customer underscore and then some random string however the email address of the customer is not unique so all of these customer objects all have the same email address and that is jenny.rosen at example.com so the email address is not a unique identifier for a customer in-stripe so this is one way that you can filter the list of customers by an email address and in this case the email is sent as a query string to the customer's list endpoint so this would look something like v1 customers slash no question mark email equals jenny.rosen example.com okay so that is how we can fetch a or filter a list of customers by email okay so occasionally you may want to delete an object so delete expects the id of the object to be deleted so let's go ahead and delete one of those customers that we just created so we can say uh customer is equal to await stripe.customers.del for dell right because i think delete is a keyword or like a reserved word in javascript and then we pass in the id of the customer we want to delete and we'll log that out also okay so if we run this this will delete a customer and we see that deleted is true here so that is how you delete objects in the api if we pull up the documentation for the payment intent resource you'll see that there are some additional api methods on the left in addition to the standard crud operations some resources support additional actions also known as custom methods in the case of a payment intent you'll see the confirm capture and cancel methods these work similar to update api calls but use a special api path and perform a specific action on an underlying object when we veer away from the standard create retrieve update delete and list operations the custom method names follow a verb naming convention so for instance we have dispute.close paymentintent.confirm charge.capture etc the client library will expose access to custom methods in a predictable way using a name that matches the verb seen in the api reference to demonstrate custom methods let's first create then confirm a payment intent so this is uh deleting an object and then let's see all right so we want to work with custom methods now and the first we're going to create a payment intent to confirm so we're going to say in intent is a weight stripe.payment intents dot create and in this case we're going to pass the two required arguments which are amount and currency so this will be a payment intent for ten dollars and initially we'll log the intent id and the intent dot status okay so if we run this it will create a payment intent that requires a payment method and here's the id of the payment of the payment intent that needs to be confirmed here's where the custom method comes in so we've first created a payment intent now we want to confirm this payment intent so the second is to confirm the payment intent this is where we're going to use a custom method oh wait stripe.paymentintents.confirm the confirm method takes in the id of the payment intent so i'm going to i'm going to break this up on a few different lines just to see what this looks like so we're calling stripe.paymentintents.confirm the confirm method here generally we have you know create retrieve list dell for delete these are all the crud methods but confirm we would consider a custom method and the stripe node client library is going to expose these methods as the standard verbs that you see in the api reference so in this case we're going to call confirm the first argument is the the id of the payment intent the second argument is the parameters that we're passing as arguments to the confirm action in this case we need to pass a payment method for this payment intent to be confirmed so we're going to pass pm card visa again as the payment method we want to use to confirm this payment intent and then we can we'll just console.log the intent id again so we can confirm that it's the same payment intent id and the new status should be succeeded so we run this and we see that the payment intent id came back and that's the same and that the status of the payment intent is now succeeded so we first created then confirmed the payment attempt this is part of the standard flow for accepting a payment confirm again is one of the custom methods some api endpoints are nested under higher level resources so for example when working with a list of lines for an invoice those are accessible through a path which includes the id of the invoice like so sometimes accessing these nested resources requires first fetching an instance of the parent resource in this case an invoice and then second making an api call to list its lines let's take a look we want to in the case we want to retrieve a list of line items on a given invoice we'll use a nested service method and pass the id of the parent resource so in this case we're going to say fetch lines from invoice with nested service method and this works like so we're going to say lines is equal to a weight stripe dot invoices dot list line items and this is going to take a couple of arguments the first is the id of the parent resource so the invoice id and the second is any parameters that we want to use to work with the list so for example we can pass limit five here the same way that we would work with any other list endpoint in the stripe api we can do that with this endpoint because the line items is a list endpoint we can console.log lines in order to work with this though we first need an invoice id so i can use the stripe cli here so i'm going to say stripe invoices list and i'm going to limit it to one and pipe that to the jq which is a tool for working with json in the terminal and then i'm going to pipe or use the the data square bracket assessor to grab the id of an invoice so there that gives us an id we can pass that in here now if we run our code you'll see that we get back the list of invoices note two that the path here is v1 invoices and then the id of the parent resource followed by slash lines so in this case this is the end point for the nested endpoint for retrieving the list of line items that are on an invoice so that's how we work with uh nested uh service methods in stripe node okay thus far our examples have passed data into the client library methods and the client library has form encoded and sent those values to the stripe api either as part of the request body or in the query string params let's turn to passing configuration options in the request headers headers are most commonly used for authentication versioning and stripe connect you'll want to refer to the authentication episode to learn about how api keys are passed or to the versioning episode about how to specify the api version in the headers either globally or per request so the particular use case i want to cover briefly here is for stripe connect connect enables you to build a platform to facilitate payments for other sellers or vendors users connect their stripe account to your stripe account and then you can make api calls on their behalf once connected this works by passing the id of the connected account in the http headers let's take a look at how to pass the connect account id header finally let's pass the stripe account id in the connect header and show how to use sort of the the request params or request options here so we can say const customer again is await stripe.customers.create and the first argument here this is this is kind of what we've seen already email is uh jenny rosen at example.com and we'll just console.log this customer so this is this is what we were working with before but we want to pass a request header so one of the supported request headers is stripe account so you'll notice that the first argument is to the create function is this json object i'm going to create a second argument here which is another json object and this is where we pass the request options so in this case i'm going to pass stripe account camel case like so and its value is set to the id of a connected account so this is the id of a stripe connect account that has been um connected to my platform this will make an api call that will create a customer on the connected account so this is going to create a customer object for jenny rosen on my my connected stripe account so this is like a merchant or a vendor that i would be facilitating payments behalf of on behalf of with our platform so we're creating a a customer object here and this is how we pass the stripe account you'll notice that in previous versions of stripe node this account header was snake case but in the latest versions the the header follows this camel case style as a quick recap in this episode you learn how to make requests to the stripe api to create retrieve update delete and list resources we looked at the api reference documentation covered custom methods nested services and passing request headers for connect thanks so much for watching we'll see in the next one --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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