---
title: Making requests with stripe-ruby
slug: making-requests-with-stripe-ruby
published_at: 2020-12-22 17:30:04 +0000
updated_at: 2023-01-30 22:54:02 +0000
summary: 
description: Learn how to make requests to the Stripe API using the stripe-ruby 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-ruby Code: https://github.com/stripe-samples/developer-office-hours/blob/master/2020-10-30-client-libraries/ruby/demo_requests.rb  ### Table of contents  00:00 Overview 01:16 API reference 04:10 Create an object passing no params 04:48 Retrieve single object 05:52 Create an object with scalar values 07:23 Create an object with enum values 09:30 Create an object with nested hash 10:55 Create an object with a list of strings 12:22 Update an object with scalar values 14:00 Update an object with a list of nested hashes 15:33 Retrieve a list of objects 17:03 Retrieve a list filtered by scalar 18:40 Delete an object 19:10 Custom methods overview 20:12 Custom method demo 21:53 Nested service method overview 22:22 Nested service method demo 23:48 Request headers overview 24:50 Request headers demo 28:00 Conclusion  ### 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.  ### 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-ruby, client library, Stripe API, ruby, API reference, @cjav_dev]
views: 1956
author: CJ Avilla
url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/making-requests-with-stripe-ruby
youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALYCKg7E7AA
youtube_id: ALYCKg7E7AA
embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/ALYCKg7E7AA
thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ALYCKg7E7AA/hqdefault.jpg
type: video
---

# Making requests with stripe-ruby

*Published: December 22, 2020*
*Views: 1956*

## Watch

[Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALYCKg7E7AA)

[![Making requests with stripe-ruby](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ALYCKg7E7AA/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALYCKg7E7AA)

## Description

Learn how to make requests to the Stripe API using the stripe-ruby 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-ruby
Code: https://github.com/stripe-samples/developer-office-hours/blob/master/2020-10-30-client-libraries/ruby/demo_requests.rb

### Table of contents

00:00 Overview
01:16 API reference
04:10 Create an object passing no params
04:48 Retrieve single object
05:52 Create an object with scalar values
07:23 Create an object with enum values
09:30 Create an object with nested hash
10:55 Create an object with a list of strings
12:22 Update an object with scalar values
14:00 Update an object with a list of nested hashes
15:33 Retrieve a list of objects
17:03 Retrieve a list filtered by scalar
18:40 Delete an object
19:10 Custom methods overview
20:12 Custom method demo
21:53 Nested service method overview
22:22 Nested service method demo
23:48 Request headers overview
24:50 Request headers demo
28:00 Conclusion

### 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.

### 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 wanted 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 arguments can be scalar values hashes lists of hashes or lists of strings subhashes or child parameters can also be deeply nested as we'll see with the shipping address some params might be enumes like tax exempt which accepts values for none exempt or reverse in this episode we'll cover how to construct the arguments passed to the client library so that you're confident in passing scalar values or even these more complex params like lists of nested hashes i've created a file called demorequests.rb with stripe ruby imported in my api key set let's start with a very simple request to create a customer with no params i'm going to run this code in the terminal pane on the left side here with ruby demo underscore requests and this will execute our api call to create a customer with no params now in the terminal output you can see the customer object returned and the attributes that are populated for you by default now if we wanted to fetch this single customer later on we do so by making a get request with the retrieve method on the customer like so so we're going to grab the id of the customer here we'll create another customer set it equal to stripe customer dot retrieve we're going to pass in the id the string id of the customer and we'll print it out save that and run our code again and again we'll see the output for that newly created customer that we've just retrieved now the id of the customer in this case is sent in the path and not in the request body or the query strings or the query string params there's no there's no request body or query string params sent in this case all right let's spice things up a bit and create another customer this time with a name and email address create a customer this time we'll create it with an email jenny.rosen example.com and a name both of these are scalar values again the stripe api expects parameters to be passed as form and coded data in the post body not as json so the response is json but the request is a form encoded string so the above here would result in a string like email equal to jenny.rosen example.com and then an ampersand and then name equal to jenny percent 20 uh rosen so this is the the form encoded string that would be sent to the stripe api now the stripe ruby client library abstracts this away so you generally don't have to think about it but it's uh something to keep in mind if you're attempting to make requests outside of the context of stripe ruby so let's give this a whirl and see see what we get here ruby demo requests again and this time we have created a customer and this time they do have their name and email address set to the values that we sent in our request some scalars accept enum values so here let's say create a customer with enum the tax exempt parameter on the customer accepts one of none exempt or reversed so we can say customer sequel to stripe customer.create and we can pass in tax exempt exempt right and then we can just print that out and we can run this code and we'll see that if we dig into the tax exempt value here we see that it is exempt now given this is an enum if we try to pass an invalid value like invalid exam then we try to run the request you'll see that we get a 400 error we get a 400 error returned from the stripe api and the error message here tells us that tax exempt must be one of none reverse or exempt so the error message in the case of an enum where the values are limited to a specific set of possible values if we try to pass something that's not included in that possible set of enum values then we're going to get an error here and the stripe api will return a 400. similarly if we tried to pass a parameter with an invalid uh name like email underscore address which is not valid because the the parameter name is actually email and we say jenny.rosen at example.com we'll get a similar error here so if we run this again you'll see that we've received unknown parameter email underscore address so that tells you that you've passed some parameter that is either not supported by the version of the api that you're using or it's just generally not a supported parameter so you'll want to refer to the stripe api reference and to your api versions to make sure that the params you're passing are the correct so i'm going to switch this back to exempt and tax exempt all right let's up the stakes yet again and send some data nested inside of a child parameter so here we're going to like create a customer with nested hash so here we want to say customer is equal to stripe customer dot create at the top level we'll pass in a payment method this is just a scalar value similar to name or email pm card visa it's one of our test card tokens and then we'll also pass in invoice settings and invoice settings is a nested hash which has a possible set of parameters that you can pass in one of which is called default payment method which we can pass here and say pm card visa okay now if we print this out and then run our code here now pm card visa is one of those test payment methods if we pass that at the top level under payment method and then again inside of invoice settings default payment method this will make it so that our customer our test customer can successfully make recurring payments in test mode for a billing subscription and other invoices some parameters accept lists of strings so when creating a customer you can specify a list of preferred locales so here we can say something like create customer with a list of strings and we can say customer is equal to a new customer and we're going to pass in preferred locales this time we can pass that in as you know maybe this customer in particular prefers english but also speaks spanish and we can print out this customer let's also print the customers preferred locales okay now if we run this code you'll see this is how we can pass in a list of strings and in the preferred locales in the response we see both english and spanish are listed same with the output down below when we access dot preferred locales so the response from the stripe api is being deserialized into an instance of stripe customer the output here we see looks just like json and in fact it very much is json that's returned from the stripe api but we get a real stripe customer object so we're able to access methods getter methods on the instance of the customer that will return that exact data so here we're getting back en and es as our preferred lookouts now that we've created several customers let's see how we can update an existing customer so the concepts from earlier will apply however we'll also need to pass the id of the object we want to update so all objects in the stripe api have string ids the customer ids start with cus underscore and when updating the customer we'll pass that as the first argument to the update method and then the second argument is a hash with the parameters for updating the customer all right let's update the email address for a customer so here i'm going to say update a customer's email address i'm going to store the result in a variable called customer here and i'm going to say stripe customer.update and again the first parameter here or the first argument to this update method is the id of the customer and then the second argument is a hash which represents the params that we want to send to update the customer so if we say email is maybe jr example.com and then we if we print out um the customer's id and the customer's email and then run this code we'll see that in the response we get back the same id of the customer right that is the same id and we get the new email address that we just created if we change this to jr2 to demonstrate that it really is updating and then we run this again you'll see that in the second request again we're getting back the same customer id but their email address has been updated to this second version of the email we can also follow the same pattern for updating with nested hashes so let's say update with nested hash and here we might say customer is equal to stripe customer.update again the id of the customer and here we can say something like invoice settings let's set the invoice settings remember that's a nested hash and one of the arguments we can pass to invoice settings is called custom fields and custom fields takes a list of nested hashes or a list of hashes so here we can pass in notice that i'm passing an array or a list in ruby right an array and then that ray that array has one item in it that is a dictionary or a hash and that hash will have two key value pairs the first is name so a common use for custom fields is to to pass in a tax id so we'll say the name is vat and the value is uh you know one two three abc and then we'll print out customer.invoicesettings and then run this code and you'll see that the output will include a custom fields list which contains a single object which is a hash of the name and value that we passed in so this is how you can pass a we can update and we can pass in a a parameter whose value is a hash that has a property called custom fields which is itself a list of hashes so this is this is how you can kind of like pass in deeply nested data we can make a get request to fetch a page from the list of customers with the list method so here we can say just fetch a list of customers and we'll say customers is equal to stripe customer.list let me just print out the customers and then maybe we'll just puts uh customers.data.map and just pull out their ids so it's a little bit easier to read all right let's run that and uh if you scroll up really far you'll see this huge list of customer objects that is returned and by default we're going to get back 10 customers and we can see their ids here so that's how we can fetch a list of customers this is sending a get request to the customer's list endpoint the client library supports auto pagination a handy tool for working with lists so check out the episode that's all about pagination and working with list endpoints that support limit ending before and starting after all these options are covered in that other pagination episode so the customer list endpoint can also be filtered based on the date the customer was created or by the email address of the customer so if we were to add into this list method here we could filter by actually let's make this another another section here filter a list of customers by email so we can say customers or jenny rosen customers is equal to stripe customer dot list and then we're gonna filter by email jenny.rosen at example.com a common demo email address that i use and we can just p um maybe jennyrosencustomersdata.map uh let's grab their ids and also their email addresses just to show that it all of these customers do have these emails if we run this again we'll see that we got back several different customers they all have different ids it turns out that customer objects in the stripe api can you can have multiple customers with the same email address so the email address can be reused across customers so each of these ids that were printed out here are different customer ids but they all have the same email address so we were able to list our stripe customers filtered by their email address so again this is going to be a get request and in this case the parameter is going to be sent as a query string argument so this will be passed something like this we'll go like v1 customers with a question mark and email is going to be form encoded and sent in the query string param part of the request so that's what it looks like occasionally you may want to delete an object delete the delete method expects the id of the object to be deleted so let's delete one of our recently created customers here so we can say delete a customer we're going to say customer is equal to stripe customer customer.delete and we want to pass in the id of the customer and we'll just print that out we can run our code again and we'll see that this customer was deleted 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 dot close payment intent dot 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 create then confirm a payment intent so first we'll create a payment intent just with an amount into currency and we'll print out its id create payment intent i'm going to say payment intent is stripe ten dollars we'll just print out its id okay so we've created a payment intent next let's confirm that payment intent so this takes in the id of the payment intent to confirm and a test payment method okay i'm going to comment this out so we don't recreate another payment intent and then we can print out payment intent.status we'll print the whole payment intent okay so let's run this again and we will confirm our newly created payment method ah i misspelled status okay so you'll notice that the status here is succeeded but it didn't print out because or we won't be able to confirm it again because the payment intent was already confirmed but this is to demonstrate the custom method confirm note again that anytime we veer from the standard create update delete list retrieve methods the method names in the client library are going to be predictable and align with the verbs outlined in the api reference 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 let's take a look at some nested methods so first we'll make an api call to fetch and invoice so we'll say invoice is equal to stripe invoice list limit1 data.first that'll give us an invoice object and then second we want to make an api call to this nested service method to retrieve the lines for that invoice so we can say lines is equal to invoice.lines.list and we can say limit five here this second line here is again another api call so this is going to be our second api call to retrieve the list of lines from the invoice let's actually let's run this so we can see what it gives us okay and then under the hood i want to show you that this is printing or this is making the request to v1 invoices and then the id of the invoice so i n xx the id of the invoice this is the parent resource slash lines so this we would call a nested endpoint or a nested service method so this is how you can access some of those nested service methods when working with stripe ruby 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 next i wanted to dive into request params and how we can pass the connected accounts header but first a note about ruby's hash syntax when the last argument to a ruby method is a hash you can leave off the curly braces so earlier when we saw customer is equal to stripe customer dot update the first argument was the id of the customer the second argument was the email address or it was a hash the second argument was a hash with a a single key value and the key is email and the values this this jennyrosen at example.com string now when the last argument to the method is a hash you can leave off the curly braces so by default we have we can assume this sort of looks like this where the second argument we have the first argument's a string and the second argument is this hash in ruby we can leave off the curly braces if the last argument to the method call is a hash when passing request params those are actually going to be passed in a third argument to the api method the the update method it'll be passed as a second argument to the create method and here's where we can pass stripe underscore account and then an account id here we technically have three arguments we have the string we have the second argument which is going to go in the request body these are the params and then the third argument these are the request options will be placed in the headers of the request because of ruby's hash syntax we're not able to leave off of the curly braces because in this case it would assume that email and stripe account are both part of the one final argument to the update method so we do want to include the hash or the the curly braces for the second argument which is the hash here and in to avoid this confusion in most of the documentation in the stripe docs you'll find that we do include the curly braces in the code samples that we're showing and this is the reason is because when we pass the additional params for either setting the api key per request the api version per request or a connect stripe account header we want to be able to pass those in the final argument here which is again a hash also so let's actually create a customer on a connected account in order to do this we're going to call create and we're not going to pass the id of a customer instead we are only going to pass this first argument which is the params to create the customer and the second argument which is the params to specify these request configuration so we're going to pass the stripe account here so here is a stripe a stripe connect account that is connected to my platform and we'll print out the customer and if we run this code you'll see that we have created a customer object and it turns out that this customer object is only available on our connected account it's not part of our platform account so this is as if we created a writer named jenny rosen on a connected account for a uh you know a rocket ship pilot he's going to um maybe take some trip to mars or something 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

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