---
title: Notion API with Ruby
slug: notion-api-with-ruby
published_at: 2021-06-08 01:00:08 +0000
updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:14:09 +0000
summary: 
description: In this episode, we'll take a _first-look_ at the new Notion API for developers. We'll get onboarded and experiment with a ruby gem for working with the Notion API. As a small test, I created a Stripe Payment Link and piped in customer's sales into a Notion database. We also make a little PR to the notion-sdk-ruby client library on GitHub, which might be interesting if you're curious about getting into Open Source.  ### Resources  https://github.com/mgmarlow/notion-sdk-ruby
tags: [Notion API with Ruby, Use the Notion API with Ruby, Notion API with Ruby on Rails, Working with the new Notion API, Notion developer API, Ruby + Notion, Ruby on Rails tutorial, Notion API tutorial, Notion API first look, Notion API review, API review]
views: 1046
author: CJ Avilla
url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/notion-api-with-ruby
youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKPn_gg7jss
youtube_id: oKPn_gg7jss
embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/oKPn_gg7jss
thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/oKPn_gg7jss/hqdefault.jpg
type: video
---

# Notion API with Ruby

*Published: June 08, 2021*
*Views: 1046*

## Watch

[Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKPn_gg7jss)

[![Notion API with Ruby](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/oKPn_gg7jss/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKPn_gg7jss)

## Description

In this episode, we'll take a _first-look_ at the new Notion API for developers. We'll get onboarded and experiment with a ruby gem for working with the Notion API. As a small test, I created a Stripe Payment Link and piped in customer's sales into a Notion database. We also make a little PR to the notion-sdk-ruby client library on GitHub, which might be interesting if you're curious about getting into Open Source.

### Resources

https://github.com/mgmarlow/notion-sdk-ruby

## Transcript

hey what's up welcome back in this episode we're gonna take a look at notion that uh brand new notion api and we'll just play around with some of the features and see if we can get something up and running with ruby um so the notion is a productivity tool it's kind of like a hyper powered up notebook that you can use for you can even have like tasks task lists and a few other really cool things and they just released a brand new developer api it's still in beta and what i wanted to do was i've not actually like dug into the api at all and i wanted to make a video about sort of like a reaction or like a quick first a first take on the developer api for notion and we can go through and take a look at the docs and we'll review and sort of maybe give like an api review for the notion docs from from from our perspective so start building with a notion api this is pretty cool it has like a get started button where i'm assuming you can learn how to make requests so let's go back before we do the get started thing and look at just how they're how they're sort of marketing this so building blocks for developers you can aggregate data from many sources into your workspace spend less time switching increase your uh product your visibility across software and services so we've got the api reference we've got examples and we've got opportunity to partner with them i'm guessing this is like you can build uh you can build like extensions or something onto notion that other folks would then use so that's pretty cool um so the api reference is a technical guide and then we've got our example so generally that's like a pretty common thing with apis in api documentation is you'll have like the reference which tells you all of the endpoints the arguments the params the types and all of that and then you'll have examples which are sort of like end-to-end use cases maybe so what's new so we've got a live stream workshop that's cool and then connecting notion with zapier typeform automate uh automate.io that's sweet those are all sort of no code tools um so it's interesting because notion has like been a tool that i would say is like in the no code space like one of the tools that folks are using for productivity in terms of you know managing their business processes or managing their workflows there's a lot of our other no code alternatives like air table and a few others that you might have heard of but yeah let's just keep taking a look here so we've got a nice change log that's cool all right so if we dig into maybe the guides here and look at how to get started you're new to the api you got to create an integration in your workspace and then you have to create a new database in notion and grant your integration permission to access it and then we have to use code to add a page to the database so before we begin uh log into your workspace uh we need to curl and we need about 10 minutes okay so let's create our first integration so we're going to go to your integrations okay so this is this is my first knit it says in another browser window open your integrations but then this link tag should probably be target blank right yeah so let's give this thing a target blank so that it opens in a new window so i don't have to like instead of saying in another browser window open this link just like make the link open in a new browser window cool all right so new integration let's create a new integration we'll call this like a demo or something i don't know oh cool you can give it a logo great i don't need a logo internal integration token i'm guessing this is secret and we don't want to share this with folks is it an internal integration or public integration cool so we'll just start off with an internal one i'm going to show this off screen here so then we will say yep save changes cool uh oh gosh you can see it then huh all right that's right whatever uh my integrations we've got our demo integration what else do we need all right so now that we have an integration created um find the internal integration under secret tokens okay share a database with your integration so integration's both the following api permissions requires sharing permissions for users there's important difference integrations don't have access to any pages or databases in the workplace in the workspace at first you have to share specific pages with an integration in order for those pages to be accessed by the api okay um start a new or existing okay um all right so let's go to i don't know let's add a new page and we'll call it like um let's see can we just do this database okay cool and we'll say i don't know demo um or maybe we'll say like customers sure okay um oh they've called there's weekend getaway destinations sure whatever click the share button and then use the selector to find your bot by its name so that's interesting share where do we have share oh share and okay so this is the integration and then we say invite okay we've invited them and okay so um here where it says uh selecting your bot your bot bot means integration i would rename that to integration there and then you click invite okay cool so it says now your integration has permissions to read write and edit the new database once a new integration is added to a workspace anywhere before you move on you need the id of the database you just created so if you're using the notion desktop app you can click that if you're using the browser i'm guessing it's this string here or something let's see yeah it's that string that's the database id uh okay and then to add an item to the database each item in notion in a notion database is a child page we can add an item to the database by creating a new page while setting its parent to the database let's send an http request to create the page to the create page endpoint to add a new item open your terminal and do this thing what would be super cool is if this database id was already pre-filled for us but whatever it's all good properties name title text content that's pretty deep down there is the name um name i i named marwan i i have name also so let's see if that just works out of the box and paste this in and then go all the way back to here and change this to um notion key and then we need database id this needs to be our database id which is this thing okay and then let's just fire off this request hey look at that what did we get back oh look at that you're in big sur california okay cool so we hit the api so that's great and we were able to create stuff in the database there run the command and switch back to notion new item will appear in your database cool no item appearing it did appear so you add a new item to the database cool follows rest conventions the curl url represents a resource okay we're using authentication tokens all right wrapping up all right so that is kind of it so if you're if you're building up an integration to work across many workspaces you can use oauth that's pretty cool and then try some example code to get up and running so sync notion with github issues send an email from a notion trigger so how does this work oh it's using the send grid api interesting all right this is cool being able to fork it on github or view the live example let's take a look at where they're hosting their examples ah glitch very nice very nice okay so in order to make this work you have to put in your github api key notion keys etc that's cool let's take a look at this email one so this email one requires what let's see also i didn't notice if that last demo was using javascript i think it might have been uh yeah so these these examples are all using node that's cool um what if i want to use ruby if i want to use ruby do we have ruby code okay so this is all the examples it's just two you can sync notion with github or you can send an email from uh from a notion trigger what is a notion trigger i don't know okay so then let's let's take a look at the api reference here so um pretty standard on the top of the api reference we have like you know the standard ways to authenticate paginate handle versioning and errors that's great i do see that we have a notion sdk i wonder if there's someone who's already started notion ruby sdk or something like that um introducing the notion api rubygem by dan murphy all right let's see um notion ruby unofficial notion client we've also got notion sdk ruby these are all things that popped up over the last couple weeks because i think the api like just was just published so let's see um okay yeah that one was a while ago let's see what else we got here notion ruby does this one use the official api so you put in your api token and then you can say get page give it those oh wow you can pass it the full url that's nice okay um and then what else do we got here you can set the title yeah i was trying to think about how we can send like web hook or like this maybe like listening to a web hook from somewhere and then sending a notification or like updating the database in notion from a web hook and it doesn't look like there's any sort of tooling around web hooks so that could be something like some sort of middleware that we we set up is like or maybe we could use zapier to set up the web hook actually i don't know how that would work so yeah let's let's let's spin up a quick little rails app here so we'll say rails new notion play so we'll use postgres and the goal here will be that we want to create maybe like a notion page with a payment link and someone could a payment link from stripe and someone could pay and then this little rails app will listen for notifications that are happening on our um our stripe account and then it'll just like update the notion database with um like successful payments or sales or something like that so uh we'll just try to wire up stripe in notion while that's happening let's go over to our stripe dashboard and i have some payment links here in test mode one is for like chess it's like a game it was like copy that or yeah like teaching it's a course for how to teach how to how to do uh how to implement chess with ruby there's videos on this channel if you're interested in trying to implement chess with ruby but maybe we have like this is like the like chess with ruby for beginners and uh i guess this would be kind of like a website page i don't know how you actually like make this um share can i just like make this public share to the web okay so then if someone went to that page what would they see they would just see this link and then they could click on the link and they're brought to stripe checkout and then they could pay through stripe checkout and then the goal is that once they pay we we can create maybe like a table inside of notion here so let's add a new page and we'll call it like um course sales and this is going to be a table and we'll have like the customer name we can also have maybe like the let's see we're going to have like the payment id we'll have we'll store the payment intent id and then we'll have like a status maybe and then we will have the email address for the customer let's see can we change this oh nice okay so we can make that an email address and then yeah we'll call that good i think that's probably a good start and the idea would be that we want to share this with our demo integration we're going to say invite okay and all right we're done sharing so this course sales thing we're going to try to populate every time someone pays for uh for the course there so let's see how's this going to work all right so on in our rails app we need a controller to listen for web hooks so rails g controller web hooks and we'll need to add a route for that all right so in our web hooks controller we'll have one endpoint we'll just call it create and then in this create endpoint we're going to like listen for um events on our stripe account and then like when a new checkout.session.compleated event fires we want to like refetch the session with line items expanded and then we want to like put or like create a new entry in notion all right so let's see how we can do this so in order to listen for new events on our stripe account let's pull up the the endpoint the stuff to build a webhook endpoint and we'll look at the ruby code for this and we'll just grab like all this stuff here and drop it in this is not going to like verify signatures or anything we're just kind of playing around so when checkout.session.compleated we want to refetch the session so we're going to say session is event.data.object and then we're going to say actually we can just say like stripe check out session.retrieve and the id is this thing and then expand we want to expand line items and we also want to expand the customer so we're going to retrieve the checkout session and we're going to expand those items so that we have access to all of those and then we're going to use that to create an entry in notion so we need a couple things we need to set up api keys for stripe and we need to set up some sort of api keys for notion so let's say rails let's see editor rails credentials colon edit this will allow us to create some encrypted credentials where we can store our notion key and our stripe key i'm going to say let's see stripe um secret key and public key and the secret key is going to be something and the public key is going to be something and then we'll have like the notion secret key i'm pretty sure there's only one but yeah we'll just do that okay so from the stripe dashboard you can get your api keys under developers api keys they're here okay so i've got my i've got my notion integration api key i've got my stripe api keys set up now i need to add these gems so bundle add stripe i think might need stripe ruby can't remember and then i think maybe it makes sense to try one of these gems out so let's see yeah i think this might be using i don't know last touched on jan 30 okay but the notion api like just came out or like was just officially released so i'm not sure which of these we actually want to do pages create we give it the parent okay and this is linking to the api reference the official api reference so i think maybe this one's a little bit safer to work with 13 days ago um i don't know we'll we'll see so notion sdk ruby let's see how do we install this thing okay so let's add that bundle add notion sdk ruby and then we'll we'll need to create some initializers where we set up the client the notion or i'm sorry i guess we don't need an initializer if we're just going to use this client directly in that one controller action same thing with straight well with stripe we can let's do them both in the controller action that's fine um so web hooks controller and then here what i'm going to do is at the very top i'm just going to say like stripe dot api key is rails.application.credent stripe secret key and then here i guess we want like a notion client and that's going to be notionclient.new and then this is going to be rails.application.credentials.dig notion secret key i think that might work all right so then we're going to like receive the api request and then when the checkout session is completed we want to create a new entry in notion so here we're going to say like notion client dot something and this is where we're going to add the page so we basically want to do like that api request that we did in the terminal earlier but i think this is going to be how we do it so okay so let's take a look at all of this business here so the database id this database id needs to be our new the database id for like our course sales which again is going to be this id here that's in the url and then the properties the name is going to be the customer's name so let's do session.customerdetails.name and then we don't have a description we have a payment id so let's see if this works payment id and then this is going to be title actually i don't know what this what the deal is with title here and text like i'm a little confused by these properties like what does it mean for it to be the title versus something else so let's go take a look at the api ref here and when we're creating a page object i am confused by that structure so name title description select so title i wonder if title is what you always get if it's just a string property values let's see okay so if the type is what what okay okay all property values so we've got the type text text content text content text content okay so this is how you're like creating it um and then yeah like where where does title come from okay otherwise the only property value is the title okay so all right let's let's just assume that's that's right so title title text and the content for this payment id is going to be session dot payment intent i believe and then what else do we want what else did we want to store we want to store the status so here we can say status and this is going to be a title text content i'll just say paid for now uh and then we can assume that the status is going to be like one of actually let's make the status select yeah let's make this let's just play around this for a second if we make this select can we give it specific things i don't know all right well let's let's go back to select and then we'll say the select the name paid um i don't know we'll see if that works and then for the email uh okay i'm guessing this is going to be also title oh gosh those are supposed to be okay maybe this is wrong i'm not sure so we're going to need to take a look at this again so the email does the email property have something else email property values for email okay so this one's simpler so you can just say like the name and then the email the actual value so let's just say like email is session.customerdetails.email i think i don't know let's see so i think one thing that i might want to do here is is like pull out this hash the the params and put it above and just say like um update params and then we can print it out so that we can see what it looks like puts update params in the console and we'll also just pass it update params okay so what do we got going on here when the checkout session is completed we're going to re-retrieve the checkout session with the line items in the customer and then we're going to like try to update our database um let's see if it works rails s who knows i should have set this up as like an api only rails app it's a little late now but whatever oh gosh we need to use okay node end list node end node in versions i have to switch my node environment node inversions node in local she's the one that works with webpacker and then try this again while that's going i'm going to split the pane vertically so that what we can do over here is use the stripe cli i'm going to say stripe login to log into the stripe cli and this will connect to my stripe account that's the demo stripe account that i want to use i'm going to say allow access and now i can say stripe listen dash dash forward to localhost 3000 slash web hooks and now when events fire on our stripe account they should be forwarded to localhost 3000. let's also split this one horizontally because we can use stripe trigger checkout.session.compleated as like a quick test that simulates someone going through checkout um okay so then the other thing that i forgot to do over here was to go to the routes file and add an entry for resources webhooks and all right let's let's fire up the rails app and see if it starts this time uh now that web soccer our web now that the webpack webpack is installed even though we're not going to look at the view anywhere um all right so now if i say trigger checkout session completed i should see those events firing over here and we do and we have errors all over the place fantastic all right so what do we got going on here oh my gosh we haven't created the database yet because we don't need one okay rails uh rails db migrate no rails db create db migrate i think that should create the database and then migrate it even though it doesn't exist i do have postgres running so that should work okay restart rails and re-trigger this thing okay oh stuff is happening undefined method name for stripe stripe object okay so fantastic so we are receiving events um we're getting a 204 here because we're not rendering any content back i think maybe and we did get a 500 on one of them at least oh that must have been yeah okay so check out session completed we got a 500 so let's open a new tab here and go back into here and go to our web hooks controller and then we want to say or name where's name okay so customerdetails.name is that what's actually called e event.data.object.id and then here we'll say p session retrieved and its id and maybe like uh customer details or maybe this should be customer.name let's see yeah let's just give that a shot and then re rerun this thing notion version header failed uh the notion version header should be defined it was undefined okay so back to our notion sdk gem there's something we're missing here and that is the version so how do you set the version i do not see a place to set the version and it looks like it was a notion notion error no okay so maybe this is just like coming back from the notion api and this is just a generic error and maybe the gem doesn't actually support this yet so let's go look at the client notion client and see yeah it just sets the api key um and okay so let's dig through here version i'm sure is the gem version request client uh okay so from the from the api ref we sh we see this versioning thing and the versioning says that it needs to be a header that's included that has the notion version which is a date um so back in the notion sdk here we should see this this headers situation also setting like a version and it looks like um it says it's backwards and compact or it's backwards compatible required header we strongly encourage you to use this um starting june 1. okay just the other day starting june 1 it needs that header all right so this is fun this is super fun because now we need to like fork this gem or like one option as we fork this gem and fix it ourselves or yeah let's open a new issue as of june 1 the version header needs to be set per the docs here the version needs to be set i'm getting this error um when trying to create a page okay so now what we can do is if we're being super nice is we come over here to the notion sdk and we fork it and okay so we're making a fork of the notion i kind of expected something like this because because the api was like just released that i didn't expect anyone to have to really have like anything nailed down about how all this stuff works so let's go back into our to our local machine we're going to get clone the notion sdk for ruby then we're going to cd into notion sdk for ruby and let's see if they have any tests here um for uh let's see request client spec like i bet if we just run the tests maybe they should fail um okay so bundle install it looks like there are spec tests installing a bunch of stuff hopefully this is interesting i know we're doing like a whole bunch of different stuff just to play around with the notion api cannot load such file okay whatever let's see so can i just come in here and go to notion go to this thing and try to run all these tests for this one file request client okay so should set base uri so four examples no failures okay um i think the headers need to be more than just this though like i think the headers should have like this thing right it needs to have notion version and i'm guessing this is probably going to be the best one to start with and if we run this the test is going to fail okay we failed the test so now let's try to like go fix the test okay so class client.class.headers i'm going to go into the client and let's see where was it um okay client.class.headers the client here is an instance of the described class which is an instance of notion request client quest client so here i think i might be able to just do this i don't know notion dash version and then change this to this thing and then can we rerun the tests hey okay so now let's try my branch name so we're going to put it back up on my branch maybe okay pushing it back up to my branch and then if we take a look at that um forked branch okay yeah so we see the um the pull request here uh to add the version header okay that's cool um now let's go back over like i don't know if that's the right way to implement it right like maybe they want to implement it so that you can pass the version into the client when you're initializing the client ah all right that's probably the right way to do it let's go let's go do that uh no no i don't care enough um okay so now what i want to do is i want to go back to my ruby gems here and instead of loading notion ruby from the like i want to pull it from github and load gem from github and so we just say git i thought it was github okay whatever you just pass it the the thing so this is the thing so from git pull in this repository and then i think we need to specify like the branch yeah okay so then branch is going to be the branch name that we made up over here and bundle install [Music] and now rails s trigger the checkout session completed event and whoops okay body failed validation body properties name title text content should be a string instead it was null all right so for a moment we're doing too much at once so let's like narrow this down and just pass in like test name test payment id and test email and then we will rerun this we also need to like return something here at the bottom so we should say render json of like success true rails s and then we can re-trigger this thing and let's see payment id is expected to be rich text payment id is expected to be reached rich text so we don't actually want this to be rich text we want it to be wait what text how is that different from this title oh we want it to be a title how do we make it a title oh what you can't have a type another title that's weird okay what that's that's odd right that's odd okay so it's supposed to be rich text so then how do we pass the rich text um uh okay so instead of text we pass rich text uh in practice too i'd probably put this stuff down into like some object that's responsible just for this uh so instead of title it should be okay rich text properties use the okay so what does this mean um what okay so create a page this thing should show like examples on the right for all okay so rich text and then text so this one should be rich text and i'm guessing that's also rich text there i don't know let's see i think we're getting close i think we're getting close to having some some stuff here uh yeah okay so let's fire off our web hook again and then refresh this page come on holy moly so rich text.text should be defined golly so this should be just text gosh come on baby ah invalid select option paid okay so how the heck do i change the select option configure options here we go paid so then it can be paid or refunded great all right i'm not going to restart the server because i should be able to just fire this off and then this should work and ooh money money money look at that okay test name test payment id all right so now let's go let's print out uh p session just so we have an idea of what's going on there we'll yeah take this out and then we will restart our server and then we should have a better idea we can just like print out what's being re-retrieved from the api and hopefully we can take a look in more detail about what we're actually getting okay here we go this is it so we want the we want the customer's name which can be inside of customer dot name oh gosh it's null okay whatever we can do an or and then we want the customer email which is going to be in customer details and then the payment intent i thought would be on here as line items payment payment intent here we go this is the id that we want um and then payment status okay cool so let's let's go in here and then we're going to say the name is going to be like session.customer.name or like unknown or something right and then the payment id is going to be session.payment intent and then this is going to be session.payment status and this will be session.customer tales.email or like unknown example.com all right so at least we'll have some sensible defaults if there are no names or emails and we can trigger this go back to notion hey okay unknown name we've got the payment we've got status and we have the email address that's getting closer okay so let's go through our whole payment flow here um so we had we had that live okay here we go we are on the checkout page right we come to our landing page maybe we just like create this website with notion that has a link here where people can buy they click on buy comes over here they can enter their email address and then some card details and click pay uh and after they have completed payment they're not going to be redirected anywhere when you're using payment links they just kind of stay on this page at least for now and then if we come over to our course we see that jenny rosen bought this is the payment id status is paid and here's the email so that's pretty sweet okay there's likely other triggers or something we could do from here where we can say like oh if this database has a new page added to it take the email and then send them like a link to something maybe it's a link to another notion page or something i don't know but yeah i think that's pretty cool um pretty fun and i guess my little yeah i guess we should probably make a pr for for this um this like addresses what was the number the issue number uh number four um not sure if you'd prefer the version passed into the client and then just like quickly look at our changes that we made and then we'll say create pull request cool so we made a pull request to an open source library for the notion sdk we played around with the notion api we went from like start to finish with building out like a little table for course sales which are ingesting some stuff um from like stripe web hooks that we're handling with rails so yeah this was kind of fun and it's an interesting api it's like pretty limited and the shape of it is well i don't know like i'm not a huge notion user so i assume that just kind of working with these pages and blocks is going to be really really powerful for folks um the thing that really tripped me up was like the format for the data that's coming into the cell like is it rich text is it text is it a select is the select thing already created um how to pass the email etc so um yeah couple little couple little clean up things but i think the yeah as a first as a first pass this is a really really solid release for a tool that i know tons of folks use so um yeah i had fun hopefully that you found this interesting or useful in any way and if so i would really appreciate a like and otherwise we'll see you in the next one cheers

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