--- title: Subscribe to our Twitter Bookmarks App slug: subscribe-to-our-twitter-bookmarks-app published_at: 2022-07-09 12:00:18 +0000 updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:13:28 +0000 summary: description: Adding pay rails gem to our Twitter app so that we can collect payment for our Twitter Bookmarks application. Code: https://github.com/cjavdev/bookmarks-search-rails #rails #rubyonrails tags: [cjav_dev, web development tutorials, web development for beginners, vim, ruby, rails, twitter api, stripe, stripe checkout, twitter bookmarks] views: 369 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/subscribe-to-our-twitter-bookmarks-app youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bn9bSN7NvBo youtube_id: bn9bSN7NvBo embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/bn9bSN7NvBo thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/bn9bSN7NvBo/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Subscribe to our Twitter Bookmarks App *Published: July 09, 2022* *Views: 369* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bn9bSN7NvBo) [![Subscribe to our Twitter Bookmarks App](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/bn9bSN7NvBo/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bn9bSN7NvBo) ## Description Adding pay rails gem to our Twitter app so that we can collect payment for our Twitter Bookmarks application. Code: https://github.com/cjavdev/bookmarks-search-rails #rails #rubyonrails ## Transcript what's up and welcome back in this episode we're going to talk about monetizing our bookmarks app that we have built with the twitter api and today we're going to use the page m because we're building with ruby on rails the page m if you haven't seen it already is this tool by uh chris oliver it's an open source library that you can use with your with your rails applications and it has a ton of features built in but the thing that i love the most is that the models are already built for you so it's already kind of figured out all the different database structures that you'll need for subscriptions and it also has tooling for handling web hooks automatically for you just out of the box this is a really really powerful tool so the first thing we need to do is say bundle add pay and bundle ads stripe we're going to use stripe as our payment processor pay is the rails engine that wraps stripe all right the next thing we want to do is we're going to say rails pay install migrations and that's going to install the migrations from pay if we if we take a look at this ruby file you'll notice that there's uh oops let's see there are a bunch of tables that are created for you for customers merchants payment methods subscriptions and more so that's all coming for you out of the box we're going to say bin rails db migrate okay now that all of those tables are created what we can do is go to our user model here and we say pay customer by default that's really all we have to do to get started with pay but what i want to do is i want to set my default payment processor to stripe i also want to set some stripe attributes and those stripe attributes are going to be a handful of things that are passed along when the customer the stripe customer object is created so namely i want to include some metadata here so metadata is going to have things like my twitter id i'm going to pass along my user id that's just the id in my local database i also want to pass along my like twitter handle so nickname and maybe we'll actually put the uh the symbol on here and call this like nickname like this so that should pass along some attributes to stripe when a customer is lazily created the first time we actually need a stripe customer all right the other thing i want to do is we're eventually going to want to listen for and handle web hooks so we're going to use the stripe cli for this so with the stripe cli we can say stripe listen dash dash forward to and then a local url that'll form a direct connection between our stripe account and our local machine and when events fire on our stripe account will be delivered to our local machine so instead of dropping this in here localhost 3000 slash pay slash web hook stripe what i'm going to do is i'm actually going to open my procfile.dev and have this fire up on start of my dev process so i'm going to say stripe listen forward to localhost 3000 pay web hooks stripe that way i don't have to remember that that's what i need to pass every time and i'm just going to double check here in the docs under web hooks that that is indeed the path yeah pay web hook stripe okay great so now i can restart this i can restart the server here and you'll notice that at the bottom it says um one of the processes that just started is called stripe.1 ready using you're using stripe api version blah blah this is your web hook signing secret that's my default api version for my uh test or my demo stripe account that we're already logged into and now we should be receiving webhook events that fire on our account the next thing we want to do is generate some pricing page or some page that's actually going to like let us check out or go through and pay so let's say rails g controller pricing um or prices prices controller probably called a checkouts controller and we'll have um we'll have a show page and we will have a create action so let's see how much this created for us let's go to our routes and we're going to use resource singular check out if i can spell resource resource checkout for our checkouts controller here and before we let anyone pay we want to make sure that they've actually signed up so here before action we want to require user so they have to be signed up and then on the show page we're just going to render some show page and then maybe on create what we'll do is we want to like actually like redirect um through stripe checkout to collect payment let's go build out that checkout show page okay so i'm going to use tailwind ui here we're going to use this pricing section it looks like this simple no tricks pricing whatever we're just going to copy this entire thing we'll copy all the html and then we'll go through and edit and update it here so simple no tricks pricing the best bookmarks search you've ever seen all right lifetime membership so this is actually going to be a monthly subscription um stay on top of your bookmarks something like that i don't know um we're just writing copy on the fly here so um what's included so what is included there's some html here with a bunch of check boxes so you get things like i don't know bookmark categories you get things like smart folders smart folders what else do you get bookmark search we haven't actually implemented bookmark search but we will do that eventually i think i don't know maybe not okay and then what else do you get i don't know um awesome customer support that'll be me just answering emails i think pay once own it forever no i don't think so i think it's like a monthly um and then we're just gonna make it like i don't know two dollars per month usd um i don't know maybe more ambitious let's say it's 20 per month usd learn about our membership policy we're not going to actually write that copy right now and then we don't have a free sample for anybody so let's also remove that hope from anyone's mind and we'll head back over here and refresh the page where did it go localhost 3000. alright so we should already be logged in so if i go to slash pricing i believe nope there is no it's called slash checkout this should be our page that shows us our checkout page nice simple no tricks pricing i don't like this gray background though so i'm gonna find this gray background here bg gray 100 let's see okay this looks so clean oh my word i love tailwind ui it's so good okay when we click get access that should be a post request to slash checkout that will redirect us through the checkout flow so let's do that now so we're going to go down to the bottom of this page where we say get access get access we're going to convert this into a button and we're going to wrap that inside of a form with the action being checkout method is going to be post we want to include a hidden field with the name authenticity token and the value is form authenticity token and let's see what else do we need here i think that's it um all right oh it doesn't need this href maybe instead of href we'll say type is submit so good practice oh no okay it doesn't fit the same size oh no flex center doo doo doo why isn't it why isn't it okay this is interesting okay so we have like a little dangler here you see how that the button is sort of like off on the left and it's not um so i wonder if we need to make the form have some of this border transparent text based rounded md justify center um all right so let's let's just hack on some of these classes for a second so items center justify center did we move something around i think uh i don't know get access slash button did i spell that right okay hover bg gray text white rounded okay so which of these things might be impacted by the form huh so what is being applied to the form box sizing all right well whatever we can come back to that but for now like this should sort of work why isn't it maybe it's not this is actually a form yeah okay it is oh you know what i need is um data um turbo false because i don't want to use turbo and then we click on this get access is it actually sending a post request what's going on here what is going on here uh show me all we're sending a post request right no i'm saying it get what okay so did i get this wrong method is post did i not spell that right method post all right when we refresh the page we should click on this and it should be making a post request to slash checkout how come it is not doing that um let's clear out our request logs here click it again okay 204. so it is making a post okay i was just looking at the wrong one no no content it's because our checkouts controller create action doesn't actually have anything here so what do we want to do we want to create a checkout session this is something that's available inside of pay so if we go to pay and we go to the docs for stripe check out let's see stripe and stripe checkout nope um so we should be able to say user payment processor checkout like this and okay so we're just going to drop that in here the mode is subscription and the price is going to be some price id from the dashboard so we're going to go into the stripe dashboard we're going to go to products we're going to create a new product it's going to be called bookmark app or something and this is a sas software for personal use and this is like manage your bookmarks with ease gosh the uh the copywriting is just flowing off the tongue right now flowing off the fingertips okay so this is going to be a recurring 20 a month fee and we are going to call that good all right so we're saving our product this product has now a new price so we're going to copy that price and that's what we're going to put here now we want to say redirect to at checkout session.url and we want to allow other host and we're going to say that the status here is the other because we want to redirect to a stripe hosted surface so we need this we need to tell rails that it's safe to go somewhere else all right so now if we click get access we are almost redirected stripe attributes wrong number of arguments one given okay so we go to our user model and here we actually get in the user i believe so undefined method email for user oh my word okay so our user model doesn't have an email address so i'm going to say deaf email and i'm just going to return the nickname because okay no api key provided so um the page m depends on the user model having an email but we're logging in with twitter oauth and we don't actually have an email so i'm actually well yeah nickname like this should be fine um and we'll see how far that gets us the next error we got here is the stripe api key so it turns out that pay is expecting our our credentials to be in a format like this remember when you first fire up the server this is the web hook signing secret that's spit out so that's what you want to use as your signing secret here you might have several which is why this supports a list okay so now we can restart the server now that we have our api keys saved and we can come back over here and go to our uh checkout page now we see this 20 get access we click on get access invalid email address see jav dev okay i'm going to make it at example.com just so that it is happy and this is going to be okay at example.com missing host to link to um so if we go oh so uh in as part of the pay dependencies we need to have our application mailer host url stuff set up so if we go back into the i believe it's installation here you'll notice that we need to have this action mailer thing in development rb this is pretty standard for rails so our host is going to be localhost and we're going to add port 3000 okay because we're changing that i think we need to restart the server as that is changing like the underlying application okay let's see if it works now uh boom all right we're redirected and now we can see this 20 a month manage your bookmarks with ease we can support card we can support u.s bank account the email here is kind of funky i don't know if we should ask people for their email address or something but yeah this is huh this is tricky because we don't have their email address i know that it's sometimes available but i think i'm not sure if it's available through this the default scopes for the twitter api um so let's use a u.s bank account here for this example we're going to click on test institution and we can say nope success link my account done and then we will subscribe for uh test test subscribe okay now we are going to be subscribed to the bookmark app but if you look at the logs notice that there's a bunch of web hooks that are being processed now so these are all coming in and being processed and so um we have the checkout session id in the response but now if we try to go to bookmarks we um do we have a current user yeah we have a current user why doesn't this have underscore bookmarks unauthorized oh we might need to actually refresh okay we have not done any refreshing so we might actually need to refresh our token so we'll say authorize app and now we're back to bookmarks okay so if i recall correctly i think if we go into rails console and look at user.last we should have a dot payment processor we should have a customer id there we go so we have a stripe customer id cuss underscore whatever and if i go to the stripe dashboard and look for that customer id i have a stripe customer in here and they in fact have the metadata with our twitter id our username and our nickname for twitter that's pretty cool and we have some payments that are pending here uh whatever what we want to do now is we want to use that id to add a billing button on all pages where we're logged in so let's go to application html erb and we're going to add like a new section at the top here that's going to be some like like a nav section or something and what we're going to do is we're going to say if um if we're logged in then we want to add a button or a link button link let's add a yeah let's make it um a we'll make it a link to just and we'll just call it billing manage billing where it's called yeah billing and so if we are if we're logged in so logged in again is not a method for action view so we have this method in application actually we don't application controller so we could define this method logged in def logged in which is going to just say like do we have a current user but if we refresh the page we still don't have this method logged in available to the view and the way we do that is by using this this class method called helper method logged in so this this will say like take this method and make it available to the view so now we have this link here to billing no route slot matches slash billing and we know that so let's say rails g controller billings and we're going to go to the billings controller and say that show route for the billings controller is going to bring us to the customer portal so inside of pay there's another thing called the customer portal that's available we can jump directly to the stripe customer portal based on our um our payment processor so let's see what it's called okay so current user payment processor billing portal so portal session is equal to this thing and we can just say again redirect to portal session.url allow other hosts because this is going to be another stripe hosted surface and we're going to say status is the other okay so now i should have a route for getting billing and i should be redirected to the customer portal fantastic so here is our bookmark app if we want to we can cancel our plan yeah we want to cancel our subscription and we should be able to then sort of just like return to the demo when we return to the demo we're no longer logged in so even if we try to go to well if we go to bookmarks now okay we're still able to see the bookmarks so we better go to the bookmarks controller and say that not only do we have to require a user but we have to require a subscribed user so we're going to go back to our application controller and add a new method here require subscribed user and this is going to say if the current user.payment processor dot is it i believe we should be able to check if the subscription is active so this is going to be subscription and um subscriptions active or subscribed or something yeah that's what we want subscribed so subscribe is gonna like this will work for um trials also which is nice if they're not subscribed we'll redirect them to the pricing page or the checkout page and that should be good so because i am not subscribed if the current user oh if they're not subscribed and redirect them there okay so now i'm redirected back here so i am logged in i can still see this billing button um that's a little bit odd also yeah this this like spacing on the right of the button is starting to bug me so let's go uh we'll go fix that after this i think what we're at though is maybe we want to move this nav over to the right so i think we can do that with tailwind so let's see if they have some examples here they do have some examples of navs so i believe if we look at like where is the sign up button sign up sign in and sign up and we just say justify end can we do that inside of this nav thing um also do we need to say that it expands across the whole thing no justify and i think we're missing some other yeah we're missing some other thing mdflex maybe we wanted to be using flexbox so that it that justify thing works okay cool so now we have billing and let's give this a little bit of um i don't know some just like a little bit of breathing room around the top margin top padding top okay all right well we have our pricing we have this manage billing thing i guess we also want like a method to like log out log out and we don't have that defined yet so i'm actually just going to like stub it into our sessions controller and add a method here log out that will say session at user id is equal to nil redirect to s to the root we need to add this as a route so we're going to say get to logout is going to uh sessions log out okay so now we have a billing button and a logout button logging out actually does kick us out so now we have to go back through the process we have to log in we're going to authorize the app and we're not able to actually see bookmarks right like we just can't get to it because we don't we're not paying so that's that's kind of the goal there um so we've successfully achieved that okay so let's give these some underlines um so that we can actually see them okay things are coming together this like should work or sort of work so let's say get access again let's go through checkout one more time this time we'll use a card so this automatically or like quickly will pay for us um okay we can also save our uh our payment for one click checkout next time definitely do that if you ever see one of these pages it just helps you check out so much faster with one click all right we're redirected back i guess maybe we want to also update the redirect so that we were dropped back into bookmarks because this is the page we really care about so now we have a full sort of flow where we can sign up pay we have a paywall we have a pricing page we have this billing portal and all with just about you know 25 minutes of um playing around with the pay gem so this again is a bookmarks application that is monetized using stripe we can see again inside of here we can look at the subscriptions the one hiccup is that we don't have an email address which is sort of like a hard requirement for working with both pay and stripe checkout so we'll need to figure out how we collect that email address as we're checking out i think we could also potentially just ask the user for that when they're first being signed up like if we go to create the user after they authenticate and we did not receive an email as part of the oauth flow we can ask them for the email at that point otherwise yeah we have two charges that went through successfully here and things are looking good so i think that's where we're gonna wrap it thanks so much for watching and we will we'll call it good there i will push this code up it'll be available on github and i'll link to it down in the description thanks again and we'll see the next one [Music] --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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