Triggering actions with webhooks

How to use webhooks to respond to offline payment events.

A webhook is an HTTP endpoint that receives events from Stripe.

Webhooks allow you to be notified about payment events that happen in the real world outside of your payment flow such as:

Successful payments (payment_intent.succeeded)
Disputed payments (charge.dispute.created)
Available balance in your Stripe account (balance.available)

While the Dashboard is great for one-off actions like refunding a payment or updating a customer’s information, webhooks are essential for scaling your payments integration by helping you process large volumes of business-critical events.

Build your own webhook

You can build a webhook handler on your own server to manage all your offline payment flows. Start by exposing an endpoint that can receive requests from Stripe and use the CLI to locally test your integration. Each request from Stripe contains an Event object with a reference to the object on Stripe that was modified.

Create a webhook endpoint

Add a new endpoint in your application. You can act on certain events by checking the type field of the event object sent in the request body. For now, let’s print to standard output to make sure our webhook is working.

Start your server after adding the new endpoint.

# Set your secret key. Remember to switch to your live secret key in production.
# See your keys here: https://dashboard.stripe.com/apikeys
Stripe.api_key = 'sk_test_4eC39HqLyjWDarjtT1zdp7dc'

require 'stripe'
require 'sinatra'
require 'json'

# Using the Sinatra framework
set :port, 4242

post '/webhook' do
  payload = request.body.read
  event = nil

  begin
    event = Stripe::Event.construct_from(
      JSON.parse(payload, symbolize_names: true)
    )
  rescue JSON::ParserError => e
    # Invalid payload
    status 400
    return
  end

  # Handle the event
  case event.type
  when 'payment_intent.succeeded'
    payment_intent = event.data.object # contains a Stripe::PaymentIntent
    puts 'PaymentIntent was successful!'
  when 'payment_method.attached'
    payment_method = event.data.object # contains a Stripe::PaymentMethod
    puts 'PaymentMethod was attached to a Customer!'
  # ... handle other event types
  else
    puts "Unhandled event type: #{event.type}"
  end

  status 200
end

Install and set up the Stripe CLI

Command Line

# Install Homebrew to run this command: https://brew.sh/
brew install stripe/stripe-cli/stripe

# Connect the CLI to your dashboard
stripe login

For additional install options, see Get started with the Stripe CLI.

After you have the Stripe CLI installed, run stripe login in the command line to generate a pairing code to link to your Stripe account. Press Enter to launch your browser and log in to your Stripe account to allow access. The generated API key is valid for 90 days. You can modify or delete the key under API Keys in the Dashboard.

Command Line

stripe login
Your pairing code is: humour-nifty-finer-magic
Press Enter to open up the browser (^C to quit)

If you want to use an existing API key, use the --api-key flag:

Command Line

stripe login --api-key sk_test_4eC39HqLyjWDarjtT1zdp7dc
Your pairing code is: humour-nifty-finer-magic
Press Enter to open up the browser (^C to quit)

Test your webhook locally

Use the CLI to forward events to your local webhook endpoint using the listen command.

Assuming your application is running on port 4242, run:

Command Line

stripe listen --forward-to http://localhost:4242/webhook

In a different terminal tab, use the trigger CLI command to trigger a mock webhook event.

Command Line

stripe trigger payment_intent.succeeded

You should see the follow event in your listen tab:

Command Line

[200 POST] OK payment_intent.succeeded

You should also see “PaymentIntent was successful!” printed in the terminal tab your server is running.

OptionalCheck webhook signature

Deploy your webhook endpoint

When you’re ready to deploy your webhook endpoint to production there are a couple things you need to do:

Use your live mode API keys and not your test mode keys.
Configure your webhook endpoint in the Stripe Dashboard or with the API.

To configure your endpoint in the Dashboard, go to your webhook settings.

Click “Add endpoint” and enter the URL of your endpoint, the Stripe API version, and the specific events you want Stripe to send.

Replace the webhook endpoint secret in your application with the new secret shown in the Dashboard view of your endpoint.

That’s it! Your application is ready to accept live events. For more information on configuring your webhook endpoint, the Webhook Endpoint API, and testing in test mode see our Development guide.