---
title: Setting up React in a new Rails application
slug: setting-up-react-in-a-new-rails-application
published_at: 2020-11-10 12:02:08 +0000
updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:14:39 +0000
summary: 
description: https://github.com/cjavilla-stripe/office-hours-rails-react #rails #rubyonrails
tags: []
views: 742
author: CJ Avilla
url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/setting-up-react-in-a-new-rails-application
youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqBARbg28NA
youtube_id: KqBARbg28NA
embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/KqBARbg28NA
thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/KqBARbg28NA/hqdefault.jpg
type: video
---

# Setting up React in a new Rails application

*Published: November 10, 2020*
*Views: 742*

## Watch

[Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqBARbg28NA)

[![Setting up React in a new Rails application](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/KqBARbg28NA/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqBARbg28NA)

## Description

https://github.com/cjavilla-stripe/office-hours-rails-react
#rails #rubyonrails

## Transcript

all right well we tried to go live and record an episode of not an episode just we tried to go live and show how to set up rails with react and i didn&#39;t realize that my audio was not even turned on uh and last week i tried to do a screen share and i was only sharing my face so um this this totally happens okay so this is like two weeks in a row where i&#39;ve made huge flubs um with live streaming but you know what it&#39;s live and that&#39;s what happens and uh yeah so we&#39;re gonna try again but this time we&#39;re gonna try it for reals and we&#39;re gonna the goal of today&#39;s sort of stream is to build a super simple page just like this with rails where when you click buy you&#39;re redirected to checkout to pay for something with stripe john my buddy john jumped on and he was like hey there&#39;s no audio for the last one so um we are gonna have audio this time okay so we&#39;re gonna start from scratch uh if you are following along in the comments i&#39;m gonna post a link to the guide that i&#39;m that i&#39;ve sort of followed to set up rail or react with rails so there is a link to the guide i&#39;m going to also not forget to share my screen so here&#39;s my screen okay so what we&#39;re going to do is we&#39;re going to start from a brand new rails application and we&#39;re going to work our way up to having a a rails app with react installed and then we&#39;re going to use that to redirect to checkout on the client um yeah so so let&#39;s let&#39;s get after it so we&#39;re going to say rails new office hours rails react dash t to skip tests dash databases postgresql that&#39;s just the flavor of database that i prefer rails also supports like sqlite three mysql a whole bunch of other plug-in or like you know database management systems i&#39;m using webpack is equal to react and that&#39;s going to set up some of the webpack stuff for us and that will handle like web packer install for us by default and i&#39;m saying skip listen because i&#39;ve had issues with it in some unix environments and then finally skip turbo links because turbo links also mess around a lot with our um with our javascript that we read on the front end so this is how i generally scaffold a rails application takes a minute or two to get going um but that&#39;s what&#39;s happening so what we&#39;re going to do is our rails app is going to be pretty simple the back end is just going to have one controller to start it&#39;ll be a static pages controller and just going to render some html and then we&#39;re going to like move around some javascript files create some new files get react working on the front end and then we will install stripe.js we&#39;re going to use react router dom on the front end for our our client side routing but this is really kind of just to show like how generally we might set up um react with rails all right so the first thing i want to do is open up a gem file and add uh stripe or stripe rubygem i&#39;m also going to add annotate and cry rails to the gem file okay cool so we are installing some dependencies the next thing i&#39;m going to do is set up my stripe.rb initializer where i say stripe.api key is equal to my rails credentials i can say editor is vi rails credentials edit to set up some credentials using the rails credentials management okay those are my api keys we&#39;ve got stripe is at the top level secret key public key in a web hook secret all right so our um our chronicles have been encrypted we&#39;ve got our api keys installed we&#39;ve got stripe installed we also want to go to um yarn add react stripe.js and stripe gs we also want a yarn add react router react router dom okay and then we can probably fire this up rails s or rails server this will start the server we come back over here and refresh localhost three thousand yay you&#39;re on rails super cool okay i&#39;m gonna edit routes that are b and add a route to uh actually yeah we need to we need a controller rails g controller static pages root cool so that&#39;s gonna this is this static pages controller is gonna be sort of our root controller for the html that&#39;s served from the back end every other controller that we build on the back end will be an api only controller just for like creating the checkout session objects otherwise we&#39;re just going to be sending back this html and then we&#39;re going to use react and mount react directly into this sort of standard html here um [Music] if i not have a gem installed what&#39;s going on here sometimes i have issues with spring i don&#39;t know what&#39;s uh what&#39;s up with it but uh sometimes commands like this will just hang and i don&#39;t get any feedback i&#39;m not sure what the answer is or why that happens but um yeah if you if you know what&#39;s going on there i would love to to hear so if you want to leave just a comment below or hit me up on twitter that would be sweet so that&#39;s kind of hanging and if i after i&#39;ve like removed um the spring yeah so once i remove the spring gem it just kind of it works i don&#39;t know what&#39;s up okay so the next thing we want to do is go into our javascripts directory and change the name of our pack to index okay and then we want to add routes and we want to add components uh okay and then in our components we need an app asx and maybe a home.jsx and a hey btn.jsx in our routes we&#39;ll have index.jsx so on so in application html erb we&#39;re going to use the javascript pack tag for index and that should load our index.jsx pack and in the index.jsx pack we&#39;re going to mount um or we&#39;re going to render our app component and our app component is going to be defined in components app.jsx okay and then in components app.jsx we want to import react from react and we&#39;re going to export default uh props and this is actually just going to be um routes which we&#39;re going to import routes from route index.jsx okay and then in our routes we&#39;re going to use like the react router dom stuff so let me remember what that looks like um let&#39;s see so browser router as router route switch from react router dom and then i think we say like export default and it looks something like this router switch and then in here we have a route where the path is exactly slash and the component that&#39;s rendered when we hit the route the the root route is the home component which we&#39;re going to import home from components slash home okay and this doesn&#39;t actually have anything in it yet so import react from react and then we&#39;re going to say um or default uh let&#39;s see i react in the root in static pages root html i&#39;m going to just delete all the content because we&#39;re actually we don&#39;t actually want any content there um let&#39;s see what&#39;s going on here rails s so i&#39;m restarting the server um okay so server is fired up refresh the page yay you&#39;re on rails that&#39;s not the route that i want though routes uh okay so route to static pages root so when the root route is hit so when when we receive a uh get request for slash it should render the static pages root page and then otherwise i&#39;m going to say if we get any other requests for anything go to static pages root so if i don&#39;t know about the path that&#39;s being requested i&#39;m putting this at the very bottom if i don&#39;t know about the request it&#39;s be the path that&#39;s being requested i want to render the root page so that it&#39;s populated with or we&#39;re mounting um our react app and using the client side routing for that so if we refresh the page here we should see possibly some maybe some react stuff okay we&#39;ve got an error that&#39;s cool react is not defined in routes index cool routes index import react from react okay refresh the page cool we&#39;ve got high react that&#39;s great all right so now in our pay button function or our pay button component let&#39;s go implement that so we&#39;re going to say hi react instead of high react we&#39;ll say like i don&#39;t know pay a uh five dollars or something or maybe like yeah buy me a coffee that seems pretty common a btn so we&#39;re going to import that component okay and then here we&#39;re going to say import react and then export default and this is going to be a function component and inside of here what are we going to do we&#39;re going to say return a button which when it&#39;s clicked we&#39;re going to say handle click um and it&#39;s just going to say like pay okay to find that click handler all right so by default we want to prevent defaults by default we want to prevent default eat up prevent default okay console.log clicked cool just to make sure that we&#39;re wiring stuff up right so we&#39;ll refresh the page we should see a button that says pay whatever and we don&#39;t handle click is not defined handle i didn&#39;t spell it right and i&#39;ll click again all right we&#39;ve got a button when we click it we see clicked in the console that&#39;s cool so all right so in this click handler what we want to do is create a checkout session on the server and then we want to redirect to checkout on the client or on the front end so what i&#39;m going to do is create a new controller i&#39;m going to call it api v1 check our like maybe payments and this is going to create a namespace controller in the api v1 payments or the api v1 namespace and it will be just a uh you know standard rails controller that deals in uh transacts and you know json graphics and json okay so here we&#39;re going to say we&#39;re going to have a create method that will create our checkout section um so we&#39;re going to say you know like a session is stripe checkout session.create and in here we need a mode payment method types a success url cancel url and line items okay so the mode in this case is going to be payment this could be subscription setup or payment payment is for one-time payment payment method types is the list of payment method types you want to accept so it could be card it could be ideal it could be shiro pay it could be sepa debit it could be like a whole bunch of different payment method types success url we want we want to come back to um this page slash root rails can be a little tricky to figure out what that is so what i&#39;m going to just do is root url is that a helper maybe i don&#39;t know root url let&#39;s just see and then line items is an array of objects or an array of nested hashes where each item in the hash is an item that will be displayed in checkout so here we want to say like quantity is one and we could specify a price here price is the id of a price so let&#39;s go create with the stripe cli i&#39;m going to create some prices so i&#39;m going to say stripe prices create or actually yeah so stripe products create name is coffee and this will create a product on my account and i&#39;m going to copy that name and say stripe prices create for that product i want to create a price whose unit amount is 5 euros and the currency is euros and what else do we want here i think that should be good because it&#39;s not recurring it&#39;s just a one-time price so that should be enough for us so i take that price id and that&#39;s what i want to pass in here under price there&#39;s a couple ways you can do this you can use price data as an alternative if you&#39;re kind of like building ad hoc on the fly prices but i am going to specify this directly as a price object um okay so i think this might create our checkout section as expected and you know what i&#39;m just going to like render json of that entire session back to the client i&#39;m also going to disable csrf protection i&#39;m kind of being a little bit um really nilly here but let&#39;s see so skip before filter yeah verify authenticity token i got to go to routes and make sure that we can we can hit this so we say namespace api and then namespace v1 view and then resources payments only create so this should create a mapping between the like host to slash api v1 payments which when hit should create a checkout session using our api key set in the initializer and should render the json back to that session so let&#39;s uh let&#39;s give it a whirl from the command line so if i had to say curl local host 3000 slash api v1 payments that should create a checkout session until we get back uh it did not what did we get uh it looks like we got the root back so um oh because we didn&#39;t send a post request dash x post because it does not know about how to make a get all right so we got some error that&#39;s good undefined method skip before filter it&#39;s probably skip before action i always mix those up okay cool so this is our checkout session that we got back and this is the id that we want we&#39;re going to use this id to redirect to checkout so i&#39;m going to go back to my front end here and go back to my payment button and so here i want to say make a post request to api v1 payments and we don&#39;t have any data we&#39;re passing back but theoretically you could pass any data that helps construct the checkout session um or configure the checkout session or whatever and then when we when we get the response i&#39;m actually going to use a weight here uh checkout session equals wait this thing okay so once we&#39;ve got the checkout session we can say stripe.redirect to checkout and we pass in the um session id is equal to checkout session.id all right so this theoretically should work uh but we have not initialized stripe.js yet so let&#39;s see import um load stripe from at stripe stripe js uh cons stripe is equal to load stripe and i pass in my publishable key all right so note that you want to you want to do this load strike bit before or like outside of your render so like if your component is constantly rendering and you keep calling load stripe that&#39;s bad you want to load it just one time so that it&#39;s set ready to go and then you can call it elsewhere so i&#39;m going to refresh the page i doubt that i got this perfectly right the first time so let&#39;s see what errors we&#39;re going to run into i&#39;m going to add some break points here so we can play around so we&#39;re in our handle click function cool let&#39;s see all right we got a checkout session created it has an id wow uh okay is this the id that is the id wow redirect to checkout is not a function okay so looking at the integration builder here uh wait redirect stripe.redirector checkout okay uh yeah so this is gonna return a promise hans result is equal to a weight did i get the spelling right redirect to checkout okay let&#39;s give it a whirl here uh also we should probably check to make sure that stripe is actually in set up right stripe.redirect to checkout is not a function okay how is stripe being set up here load stripe oh stripe promise okay got it got it got it got it got it got it okay so stripe this should be striped promise stripe promise and we need we need that to resolve um yeah so we can do that here so we can say like con stripe is equal to a weight stripe promise inside of the handle click function okay because load stripe returns a promise we were trying to call redirect to checkout on the promise rather than like the actual object that the promise would was resolved with so if we click pay now we should actually redirect to checkout and we do and this is the checkout session um it&#39;s branded this is kind of like our colors we can enter an email address here you can see like a bunch of different payment method types this is super cool if you wanted you know someone could pay you for a coffee with ideal or shiro pay or sep a debit or whatever the one limitation is that the payment method type has to match the currency so if you&#39;re selling in you know rupees or pounds or dollars or canadian dollars or whatever it&#39;s going to be a little different which payment method types are supported so um yeah let&#39;s just pay with uh with ideal here test click pay we should be redirected back um hopefully to our root page after we have successfully authorized this payment so now we are redirected back um okay so we could go to our yeah that&#39;s that&#39;s kind of what the front end would look like right maybe you you instead of redirecting just back to the root uh you might redirect back to a specific page like this these this success url could be like the thank you page um and the the cancel url is just where people will bail bail back out to so wherever you&#39;re redirecting the thank you page that&#39;s that&#39;s cool this the checkout session create takes a ton of different parameters so you can pass in a lot a lot to configure the checkout session here if you wanted i&#39;ve got a couple more minutes so why don&#39;t we create also the webhooks controller so railg controller web hooks and this will be where we receive web hooks the really important web hook that we want to listen for with checkout is the checkout session completed event so i&#39;m going to go to my web hooks controller here add a create method and i&#39;m just going to copy the build the web hooks uh code for ruby is here i will just grab this bit and okay so we&#39;re gonna read the requests body the raw body right we want the most raw version of the body so that when we do signature verification we&#39;re verifying based on the raw payload the signature that&#39;s in the request header sent by stripe which is used to check and verify the request body payload hasn&#39;t changed with your webhook signing secret um depends on that payload not changing so if you have some middleware installed or some gems that are installed that are modifying the request that&#39;s why you want to use like the most raw version rather than just like params or something so the endpoint secret in our case is being stored in um stripe webhook secret and when we call stripe web hook construct event with the payload signature header and endpoint secret that will deserialize the webhook event uh the event data posted from stripe to us and it will also check that the signatures are valid and um it&#39;ll verify those i&#39;m going to say messages e status is 400. if we respond with anything other than a 200 http status code here then stripe will consider that a failure like a web hook endpoint failure and it will retry the web hook with exponential back off this includes redirect so if you&#39;re if you if your web hook endpoint changes and you are sending like a 301 or 302 those are considered failures and the stripe web hook post will not follow those redirects so you&#39;ll need to fix that up so if event type is equal to checkout.session.com then what we want to do is um puts like checkout complete enjoy that coffee all right i need to use the same kind of quotes i don&#39;t know why i&#39;m mixing and matching that&#39;s all right and then in all other cases other than those error cases we&#39;re just going to render back to stripe some json that says success and we should be good to go all right so with the stripe cli we can use stripe listen dash dash forward to local host 3000 slash web hooks this will create a direct connection between stripe and my local machine and when events happen on my stripe account they will be delivered to my machine and forwarded to this local web hook endpoint so if we go back to the front end here click on pay and walk through the checkout process if we enter in just like actually let me show you what it looks like with um an sca card this is like the secure customer authentication test card for europe it shows you kind of like what the sca flow is so in europe when you click on pay in some cases you&#39;re issuing bank will require like sort of like a 2fa like a two-factor auth it&#39;s very similar to that where you would have to like enter in a one-time pin or authenticate with your bank or what have you and so by completing that authentication you that&#39;s all like handled by stripe but a modal will be popped up and the customer will have to walk through this authentication flow all handled by checkout for you super cool so we&#39;re again redirected back here we can go to the dashboard so i can show you that these were like a couple of successful payments here so let me pull up my demo account and go to test data and payments and we should have some successful payments here at the top so these were for uh the coffee that we just paid for moments ago five bucks pretty sweet so yeah so this is uh redirecting to checkout with react and rails in a future episode we will do accepting a one-time payment with react stripe.js elements and uh and react so hopefully this was helpful this was in specific response to a tweet that i got so um hopefully chris i think let&#39;s see let me try to find the tweet and i can share it with you uh looking here chris sanchez was like what did he say chris sanchez is in um the 100 days of code challenge here um and here he says uh you know day 10 still wrestling with stripe api on my rails back end and react front end um if you help newbies i would appreciate it so yeah hopefully chris uh i&#39;m really hopeful this was helpful uh if i i kind of i think we talked about it and you were using re check out uh if you were using elements which is you know where you built you&#39;re building your own custom form that&#39;s a little different and so we will um we&#39;ll show a demo with stripe elements but you can also check out the integration builder if you&#39;re building a custom payment flow you would click on custom payment flow pre-built checkout page is like the stripe hosted page that you just saw that had the the branded background so this page here is the branded page this is the branded page and this is what the branded page looks like this is a stripe hosted page and it requires those two things creating a checkout session on the server redirecting on the client separately if you wanted to use elements that&#39;s where you build your own custom form element with these controls so stripe elements is a set of controls that you can use to build your own custom forms elements are a little bit more work you have to implement each of the payment methods individually you you have to like kind of make sure that you&#39;re doing all the error handling correctly but this with stripe elements there are some components that help you with that um but again with checkout this is all kind of like pre-built for you and you mostly just make sure that you&#39;re redirecting to check out with the correct configuration so um i think i&#39;m going to leave it there and yeah we&#39;d love to hear any feedback you have and yeah love love hacking on these things little projects and little demos so um yeah stay tuned for more stuff i think maybe we&#39;ll do a couple more react and maybe some view maybe a little bit of angular but yeah really enjoying hanging out and playing in the rails ecosystem lately all right bye friends

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