--- title: Server side redirect to Stripe Checkout slug: server-side-redirect-to-stripe-checkout published_at: 2021-07-02 18:49:53 +0000 updated_at: 2023-01-30 22:53:23 +0000 summary: description: In this episode, we'll explore the many ways to redirect to the Stripe hosted Checkout page. First, we'll build the standard client-server Checkout flow where a Checkout Session is created server side, and use JavaScript to redirect on the client. Then, we'll refactor to use the brand new `url` property that is returned as part of the Checkout Session object to redirect server side. Finally, we'll show the simplest way to redirect to Checkout using a Payment Link. ### Presenter CJ Avilla - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ### Resources Official documentation: https://stripe.com/docs/payments/accept-a-payment?integration=checkout ### 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 checkout, checkout, ruby, sinatra, server side redirect, @cjav_dev] views: 8964 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/server-side-redirect-to-stripe-checkout youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSki6n502mk youtube_id: WSki6n502mk embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/WSki6n502mk thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/WSki6n502mk/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Server side redirect to Stripe Checkout *Published: July 02, 2021* *Views: 8964* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSki6n502mk) [![Server side redirect to Stripe Checkout](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/WSki6n502mk/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSki6n502mk) ## Description In this episode, we'll explore the many ways to redirect to the Stripe hosted Checkout page. First, we'll build the standard client-server Checkout flow where a Checkout Session is created server side, and use JavaScript to redirect on the client. Then, we'll refactor to use the brand new `url` property that is returned as part of the Checkout Session object to redirect server side. Finally, we'll show the simplest way to redirect to Checkout using a Payment Link. ### Presenter CJ Avilla - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ### Resources Official documentation: https://stripe.com/docs/payments/accept-a-payment?integration=checkout ### 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 so if you're a striped checkout user then you might be familiar with the process where you create a checkout session on the server and pass its id back to the client and then on the client you'll use stripe.js to redirect to checkout many users have said that this is cumbersome and they would prefer to be able to just take the checkout session and redirect directly server side and so that is a feature that we have recently added today what i wanted to do was go through the process of setting up a little sample app and we'll go through the flow uh both for redirecting to checkout on the client side and on the server side i'm going to use the stripe extension here for vs code and we're going to start with a stripe sample app i'm going to say developer office hours this is going to allow me to pick a starter integration we'll just use html today and we'll use a ruby backend ruby is still my favorite and we'll drop this into the office hours directory and we'll open it in the same window okay so if we were to let's also open up a terminal here and cd into the server side and we'll say bundle install to install our dependencies with bundler next we can say ruby server and this will fire up the ruby server and run it on localhost 4242 now we can open up a browser window and navigate to localhost 4242 and this is kind of where we start is with a blank slate for the office hours demo so if i go back to vs code here on the client in index html so previously what we had to do was install stripe.js from js.stripe.com and it is a best practice to load this on every single page so we'll start off with this installed and then maybe we add a button here let's actually add a form and initially we'll just not have any actions and we'll have a button where we just say pay and this will be very very simple very simple and we're going to keep keep the id maybe as payment form or something like this we're also going to need some some javascript here where we can say like stripe is a new instance of the stripe object where we're going to uh we're going to initialize an instance of stripe with our publishable key so we can find our publishable key from the stripe dashboard so we'll head over to dashboard.stripe.com and we'll dive into the developer section here in test mode to grab our publishable key and we're going to grab that publishable key and put it in the constructor function here we want to grab reference to this form so we're going to say dot get element by id we'll pass in that form the forms id and then we'll say const form is equal to that and then form dot add event listener submit so when the form is submitted we want to do this callback and this callback we're going to prevent default so e dot prevent default and then we're going to call stripe.redirect to checkout and pass in some id session id is going to be the id of a checkout session so session.id perhaps and in order to get this checkout session id we need to make a request to the server where the checkout session will actually be created so here we can make a fetch call so i'm going to say const session is equal to await fetch and the the route we're going to go to is create checkout session and we need to pass in some args here so our method is going to be a post request and we're going to have some headers which let us pass in the content type of application json then we also might need a body where we're going to json.stringify anything that we wanted to pass to the server in this case we don't actually have anything that we want to pass the server and then this fetch method it's built into the browser it's a way that you can make asynchronous calls with javascript to a server route and it will return a promise that's going to resolve with an object that will have a method called jsonr.json which will actually like also return a promise that will resolve with the json object that was returned from the server so this create checkout session is a method we'll need to add to the server and we'll get back a session object and that will ultimately let us redirect to the checkout session so let's save that and just go look at our page real quick just to make sure that we have a big beautiful pay button there and if we open up the terminal here the first error that we see is that we cannot add cannot read property at event listener of null that's because this javascript is running before the page is loaded so let's say document dot add event listener dom content loaded and we want to only run this function when the dom is fully loaded so we're going to just wrap that entire thing in this callback okay and i'm going to make this a little smaller here so we can see more of the code refresh the page and now we can see that like this is we don't have any errors anymore but when we click the button we're going to see a failure because this route this create checkout session route does not exist yet so let's head back to our server and we can add this route here so in server.rb this is a sinatra app we have two routes we have a get route for the route which is simply returning that html page we were just editing and it also has a route for creating a or for handling web hook notifications and so that's already sort of set up for us so let's add a new route this is going to be a post route to create checkout session and what we want to do in here is i think we want to say content type is application json and we're going to return a checkout session so we need to create a brand new checkout sessions i'm in vs code and i have the stripe for vs code extension here i can say create checkout or let's see stripe check out session create and hit tab and it'll automatically fill out a bunch for me so i can say http colon local host 4242 success and i can copy that and paste it here we have our payment method types the list of payment method types maybe we can also add in like alipay just for example and then we need a list of line items here this is actually very flexible and we can pass in several different things in this case it is accepting or expecting a price id and a quantity based on what this is how this is set up so in order to get a price id what i want to do is actually go back to the terminal let me create another terminal here and let's use the stripe cli to list our prices so i can say stripe prices list type is one time so that'll give us a list of one-time prices and we can just grab one of the ids for one of those one-time prices if you don't already have prices created you can create them either from the api or through the dashboard by creating a product and an associated price so this will just allow me to automatically or this will allow me to use a price that i've already created by finding one that already exists the mode here is payment and i think that's all good now we want to save this off into a session and we want to render that back as json session.2.json all right before we go test this on the client let's just make a curl request locally oh gosh that's that's uh okay some prettier or something is running and is making this code look different than i would prefer uh so let's put this back over here and i think when i save is it gonna try to reformat no okay um it is okay whatever we'll just leave it like that and so if we say curl we need to we need this should be a post request so curl dash x post localhost 4242 create checkout session and we don't actually need to pass it any data okay the currency provided is invalid for one or more payment method types oh because we are using alipay so let's just remove alipay from the list of payment method types and we need to again restart the server and go back to zsh okay so this is the the whole checkout session that we got back and what we care about most is the id for the checkout session because we want to use that to redirect so now back on our html page here that's this session will be the same as this object that was just returned so now if we refresh the page here clear out our terminal log and hit pay then we are redirected to checkout so this is the actual that's the whole flow we've kind of done the the whole process that you would have with redirecting client side so what's really cool is we can actually remove a lot of this code so everything that's here on the client side so everything from creating a brand new instance of stripe to adding this event listener in fact all of this javascript on the client we can delete so i'm going to delete all of this code on the front end and instead with our form i want to add a new action and it's going to be slash create checkout session and the method is going to be post and we're going to depend on the browser's built-in action and method that's that's part of the form the form control and now when we click on the pay button on the server instead of rendering this back as json what we want to do is redirect to session.url so that url property was not returned before so here we see this url property that has like this giant url that is on checkout.stripe.com this was not previously returned now it is returned and so we can actually just use that url directly to redirect so i believe we want to take out this content type and now we should be able to redirect server side so the the functionality should be exactly the same so we'll go back to our uh test mode here actually we'll just um let's go to ruby restart our server also this should be cancel but uh insignificant and all right so now if we refresh the page you'll notice that there is no javascript anymore on the page that that we're using to handle the form submission so it's it's all just a server-side redirect so now if we click pay that's going to send a post request to the server the server is going to respond with a a redirect response which is going to redirect us directly to checkout in practice what we want to do is actually return with a 303 status code and yeah so this is that's how you can refactor your code from redirecting client side to redirecting server side so again we made a couple of changes here one was to instead of rendering back json as part of our create checkout session we are now calling redirect on the server side and then the other change was that we needed to update our form so that it had an action and a method of post and we were able to remove all the javascript on the client that had to do with redirecting to checkout and created the checkout session etc so this is um it can be pretty handy it's it's using a lot of the built-in functionality that exists as part of the browser's form control rather than having to like implement our own javascript so this can be pretty handy now you might imagine too that you could add in fields here that was like maybe if you had an input type of number and this is going to be like the quantity or something you would say name equals quantity and then on the server side you can still access this quantity in the post body on the server so let's let's just update this a little bit instead of passing quantity 2 i think we can say params quantity here i don't know if this needs to be a symbol or not as part of sinatra but we'll just give that a whirl we'll restart our server and now if we go back to localhost 4242 we have this quantity input here so we could say five let's buy five of these and then we hit pay that should pass the quantity five to the server and now we see that we are buying five of these 200 euro items um so that is one way that you can pass data from the server to the or from the client to the server it's quite uh this is this is how most applications were built uh before we got into like very um interesting javascript applications now in practice if you have a single page app or if you're building like a really complex javascript front end then you likely want to continue using um the you know the javascript redirect and that's totally valid it's just up to you in terms of preference this makes it a little bit easier in my opinion and a lot a lot less code you can also as an alternative to writing any of this you could create a payment link directly through the dashboard so let me show that option too because this is yet another way you can delete you can delete code is by going to products and then payment links in the dashboard and we could create a brand new payment link let's just say that we've already got this payment link oh let's actually yeah let's create a new one so um we can say maybe we want a pack of a thousand business cards so we'll say um you know one thousand that's going to create our business cards maybe we allow promotion codes and the customer can change the quantity directly in checkout say next and if we want to we can even build a marketplace where we're going to split some of this this payment with a connected account all right let's say create link we have to enter our password and now we have this this payment link where we can actually copy this to the clipboard and simplify this further yet where now we can actually just have like an a tag uh aahref is equal to this thing and um now we can just say pay and now we can delete all of the server side code where we had a create checkout session uh so this makes it even simpler now if we uh restart our server here and go back to our application and refresh the page now we just have a link you could style this to be a button also as part of a form or something but now you can just click pay and you are again redirected to check out where there's a bunch of functionality here so this is kind of we started at like the most complex maybe implementation where you are creating the checkout session on the server as the result of an ajax request returning its id to the client and then redirecting then we refactored that to use the new server-side redirect and we refactored that even further to use a payment link to redirect difference in when you would use a checkout session versus a payment link is anytime that you need to customize every single payment flow for each individual customer based on quantity or the products they've selected or any other details that the customer is going to give you as input maybe as part of their cart you'll want to use a checkout session and if you are selling a one-time item where you know ahead of time exactly what you're gonna sell but you don't know the customer you're gonna sell to then you would just create a payment link and that makes it very simple to just share on social media or uh you know share these links directly um through like text message or email or other other ways that make it very simple to accept payments thank you so much for watching if you were one of those users who was looking for the server-side redirect hopefully this fills that need for you we are always open to feedback if you have any feedback for us please let us know in the comments below or on twitter at stripe dev i'm also available on twitter happy to chat at cjabdev all right we'll see you next time cheers --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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