--- title: Test subscription lifecycles with test clocks slug: test-subscription-lifecycles-with-test-clocks published_at: 2022-03-03 19:00:11 +0000 updated_at: 2023-01-30 22:52:27 +0000 summary: description: In this episode, you'll learn how to move objects through time in test mode. Test clocks make it easier to test your Billing integration and make sure it behaves as designed. When you use test clocks you simulate the forward movement of time in test mode, which causes resources, like Subscriptions, to change state and trigger webhook events. This means that, e.g., you don’t have to wait a year to see how your integration handles a payment failure for a quarterly or annual renewal. ### Presenter CJ Avilla - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ### Resources API Reference: https://stripe.com/docs/api/test_clocks Documentation: https://stripe.com/docs/billing/testing/test-clocks ### Table of contents 00:00 Introduction 00:58 Create a new test clock 01:46 Attach the test clock to a customer 03:05 Create a subscription 03:58 Advance a subscription in time 06:02 Test a future subscription cancellation 06:24 Delete a test clock 06:41 Recap ### 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, @cjav_dev] views: 2749 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/test-subscription-lifecycles-with-test-clocks youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GsVXfDPavg youtube_id: 0GsVXfDPavg embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/0GsVXfDPavg thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/0GsVXfDPavg/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Test subscription lifecycles with test clocks *Published: March 03, 2022* *Views: 2749* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GsVXfDPavg) [![Test subscription lifecycles with test clocks](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/0GsVXfDPavg/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GsVXfDPavg) ## Description In this episode, you'll learn how to move objects through time in test mode. Test clocks make it easier to test your Billing integration and make sure it behaves as designed. When you use test clocks you simulate the forward movement of time in test mode, which causes resources, like Subscriptions, to change state and trigger webhook events. This means that, e.g., you don’t have to wait a year to see how your integration handles a payment failure for a quarterly or annual renewal. ### Presenter CJ Avilla - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ### Resources API Reference: https://stripe.com/docs/api/test_clocks Documentation: https://stripe.com/docs/billing/testing/test-clocks ### Table of contents 00:00 Introduction 00:58 Create a new test clock 01:46 Attach the test clock to a customer 03:05 Create a subscription 03:58 Advance a subscription in time 06:02 Test a future subscription cancellation 06:24 Delete a test clock 06:41 Recap ### 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 have you ever wondered what is going to happen to a subscription when it's supposed to renew in a year from now or maybe you wanted to test some mailer logic that's supposed to send an email when you receive the invoice.created event in a month from now with the launch of the new test clock object you can now simplify testing your billing integrations by simulating how objects change through time this means for instance that you won't actually have to wait a full year to see what happens if invoice payment fails for a renewal that is an annual renewal so let's jump into the example and take a look [Music] so we're going to use curl in today's demo to show how to get started with test clocks but before we do anything i'm going to jump into the stripe dashboard grab my api key and store that secret api key in an environment variable that will simplify the writing of our api requests so we're going to start by creating a brand new test clock which you can do by hitting the v1 test helpers test clocks endpoint and a test clock allows you to specify a time in the future or in the past this is going to be the frozen time that is associated with the clock when it's first started we're going to create this brand new clock and we're going to freeze its time on november 1st 2021 by passing this unix timestamp in the response we see that test clock returned to us we want to note its id so that we can attach it to a customer in the next step the clock object is how we're going to advance forward in time it's worth noting that once we freeze this time we can't move a clock's time backwards and we'll take a look at that error message in a little bit so how do we actually use the clock to simulate objects moving through time well we need to attach the test clock to one or more objects customers are the most common object that you're going to associate with a test clock but you can also create new quotes with a test clock reference note that you can only create new objects with reference to a test clock there isn't a way as of this recording to attach a test clock to an existing object all right so we're going to create a customer here we're going to pass in its email as jenny rosen we'll pass in a payment method pm card visa this is just the test string for that 4242 card we're also going to set invoice settings default payment method to that pm card visa that will make it so that when we create any subscriptions in the future it will use a valid card by default here's where the magic happens we need to pass in the test clock id so we'll specify the test clock and pass in the id of the clock that we just created and you can create several test test clocks on your account all right we'll grab reference to that customer id if we head over to the dashboard and open up that customer and look at the detail view for the customer in the dashboard you'll see this new banner at the top that tells us that a customer is associated with the test clock we see this is a clock object in a simulation and we also see the time that the clock is frozen to we don't have any subscriptions yet so let's go create one from the stripe dashboard i'm going to head over to my prices so that i can grab a recurring price note this price object is a monthly price and we'll use that to create our subscription so we're going to send an api call to the v1 subscriptions endpoint passing in the customer that we just created with the test clock and the price id for uh the line item that will represent this recurring price notice that we didn't need to pass in or specify the test clock when we create the subscription by passing in a customer this new subscription will be directly associated with that same test clock if we jump to that subscription object in the dashboard again we see a banner at the top telling us that this is a object that is in a clock simulation and again we also see the frozen time for that object now that we have a customer and a subscription associated with a test clock we can try advancing the clock into the future by changing its time so we're going to use the id of the test clock and call the the test clock advance endpoint passing in the new frozen time let's try advancing the clock one full year to november 2022 notice that we got back an error letting us know that we can only advance up to two intervals in the future because our subscription is associated with a monthly price that means we can only advance at most two months into the future so our frozen clock is tied to november 1st the farthest we can advance is january 1st of 2022 let's now advance the clock to january 1st 2022 and see what happens notice that in the response we see that the test clock is advancing and it does take a little time for a test clock to advance as it's firing off all of the web hook events and logs and api calls that are required to simulate the changes that happen through time for that test clock depending on how many objects are associated with your test clock it could take upward of 10 to 20 seconds for this to complete to track the state of your test clock you can either pull to retrieve the clock object or you can listen for test clock web hook events that fire letting you know when the clock settles after refreshing the dashboard a few times we can see that the subscription has advanced we've had several invoices that were finalized and ultimately payment was collected throughout the period between november and january 1st one thing that might be confusing when you're looking for objects in the dashboard is they will be tied to that specific time of the clock so if you're looking at your customer objects in chronological order these customers that are created associated with test clocks will actually appear lower down in the list all right next let's try advancing the clock backwards in time and notice that we receive this error that just tells us that we cannot go backwards in time with a test clock let's try one more thing let's set our subscription to be cancelled at the period end in the future we'll pass in our subscription id and update the subscription to cancel at period end then we can advance the clock one more time to see that the state of the subscription is ultimately cancelled after you're done with all your testing you can delete your test clock and all the related customers and subscriptions will be deleted in one api call by default test clocks will automatically expire after 30 days and your test clock objects will be cleaned up at the time of this recording you could create up to six customers that are associated with a test clock so as a quick recap we created a new test clock and froze the time at november 1st 2021 then we created a new test customer associated with that test clock next we subscribe that customer to a monthly recurring price in advanced time to simulate the events that would fire between november 1 and january to confirm that invoices are created successfully we also saw that we can advance the clock several times but we can't move backward in time we also learn how to delete clocks we recognize that testing your payments integration is challenging test clocks is just one of many new testing tools that we're excited to announce and we hope that you'll love now you can simulate those billing scenarios and time travel forward in time and see what your customers will see thanks so much for watching and we'll see you in the next one --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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