mockra

Adding payment options to your web application is easier than ever. One of the services that makes accepting payments so easy is Stripe. Here’s an example of setting up a subscription service for a node application.

Front End

The first step in adding Stripe integration to your application is adding a subscription page with a form. Stripe provides detailed documentation for setting up a form using their javascript library. You’ll find those instructions here.

You’ll want to make sure you update the action of the form they’ve supplied to the corresponding path on your server. The form for my subscription page looks like: form(method='POST' action="/subscriptions" id="payment-form").

Server

If you’ve setup the subscription page correctly according to the Stripe documentation, then setting up the corresponding logic on your server should be easy.

You’ll want to make sure you have a place in your userSchema to store the Stripe customer token for your user. Here’s an example:

We can then create the corresponding route and action to handle our new form. We’re going to use the official node library provided by Stripe to handle our subscriptions. You can install the library with the following command: npm install stripe --save.

Make sure you have a route setup to handle the form.

var subscriptions = require('./controllers/subscriptions');
app.post('/subscriptions', subscriptions.create);

On the server side, we want to tell Stripe to create a new user for a specific plan, e-mail, and card token we’ve just received. You’ll also want to make sure you’ve setup a subscription plan through the Stripe dashboard. Keep in mind that Stripe doesn’t share plans between test/production, so you’ll want to setup one for both.

Make sure you provide your own secret API key and plan id. You’ll also want to handle saving your user and providing a response. You might also want to setup Stripe to handle sending your customers a receipt, otherwise you’ll have to handle that on your end.