--- title: Making requests with stripe-go slug: making-requests-with-stripe-go published_at: 2021-01-05 18:00:06 +0000 updated_at: 2023-01-30 22:53:59 +0000 summary: description: Learn how to make requests to the Stripe API using the stripe-go client library. You'll see how to format parameters and pass request body, query string params, and request headers. ### Presenter CJ Avilla - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ### Resources Official client library: https://github.com/stripe/stripe-go Code: https://github.com/stripe-samples/developer-office-hours/blob/master/2020-10-30-client-libraries/go/demo_requests.go ### Table of contents 00:00 Overview 01:16 API reference 04:10 Create an object passing no params 05:15 Retrieve single object 05:53 Create an object with scalar values 09:04 Create an object with enum values 11:03 Create an object with nested object 13:53 Create an object with a list of strings 15:19 Update an object with scalar values 17:12 Update an object with a list of nested objects 20:08 Retrieve a list of objects 21:40 Retrieve a list filtered by scalar 23:30 Delete an object 24:27 Custom methods overview 25:28 Custom method demo 29:10 Nested service method overview 29:38 Nested service method demo 32:42 Request headers overview 33:44 Request headers demo 35:48 Conclusion ### Support If you have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team at https://support.stripe.com/. ### 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, stripe-go, API, client libraries, sdk, golang, go, @cjav_dev] views: 2150 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/making-requests-with-stripe-go youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wkgftgu5nag youtube_id: Wkgftgu5nag embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/Wkgftgu5nag thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Wkgftgu5nag/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Making requests with stripe-go *Published: January 05, 2021* *Views: 2150* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wkgftgu5nag) [![Making requests with stripe-go](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Wkgftgu5nag/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wkgftgu5nag) ## Description Learn how to make requests to the Stripe API using the stripe-go client library. You'll see how to format parameters and pass request body, query string params, and request headers. ### Presenter CJ Avilla - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ### Resources Official client library: https://github.com/stripe/stripe-go Code: https://github.com/stripe-samples/developer-office-hours/blob/master/2020-10-30-client-libraries/go/demo_requests.go ### Table of contents 00:00 Overview 01:16 API reference 04:10 Create an object passing no params 05:15 Retrieve single object 05:53 Create an object with scalar values 09:04 Create an object with enum values 11:03 Create an object with nested object 13:53 Create an object with a list of strings 15:19 Update an object with scalar values 17:12 Update an object with a list of nested objects 20:08 Retrieve a list of objects 21:40 Retrieve a list filtered by scalar 23:30 Delete an object 24:27 Custom methods overview 25:28 Custom method demo 29:10 Nested service method overview 29:38 Nested service method demo 32:42 Request headers overview 33:44 Request headers demo 35:48 Conclusion ### Support If you have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team at https://support.stripe.com/. ### 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 the stripe api is organized around standard restful conventions it uses those standard http requests and responses with predictable resource oriented urls request bodies are form encoded and responses are json encoded http requests you make can send data to stripe servers in one of three parts of the request in the request body this is where you pass parameters to create update and take specific actions on objects so for instance if you're creating a customer the customer's email address might be something that you pass in the body of a post request http headers which is where the configuration like api key and api version are sent you know in our docs will often refer to the arguments as request params there's also query string params most often used for filtering lists with get requests in this video you'll learn how to format request parameters so that you can effectively work from the api reference to make most requests and build almost any supported stripe integration the api reference is the detailed documentation about each resource cataloging the supported parameters some sample requests and responses generally when building an integration you'll follow an official guide but may need some specialized params to solve for your specific use case on the left you'll find a list of resources expanding customers shows which api endpoints are available for working with customers under the customer resource we see the customer object and methods for creating retrieving updating deleting and listing customers the customer object describes the shape and attributes of an instance of a customer that's returned in the responses from the stripe api you'll notice that some attributes are marked with the expand label we'll cover the expand feature of the api and how to work with it from client libraries in more detail in another episode however i just want to show that this is how from the api reference you can tell which attributes are expandable the create a customer api endpoint describes the parameters sent to the stripe api when creating a customer on the far right side we see a code snippet example with some basic params note that you can switch from curl to the stripe cli or any of our officially supported client libraries to see a basic code snippet in the programming language you're most familiar with in the next section of the api reference we'll see details about making a request to create a customer these are the parameters that can be sent in the post body to the stripe api to create customer objects the most common parameters are listed at the top and then additional or more advanced parameters are included below under the more parameters subheading if your account's default api version is older than the latest version then you might also see a panel with information about breaking changes released in a newer api version note that all parameters for creating a customer here are optional if we look at the create a payment intent reference you'll see a label showing that the amount and currency parameters are required in some cases parameters might be conditionally required as is true for off session the values for these parameters or the arguments can be scalar values objects arrays of objects or arrays of strings sub-objects or child parameters can also be deeply nested as is the case with shipping address some params might be enum values like tax exempt which accepts none exempt or reverse in this episode we'll cover how to construct the arguments passed to the client library so that you can be confident in passing scalar values or more complex parameters like lists of nested objects alright so i've created a file called demorequest.go with stripe go imported in my api key set let's start with a very simple request to create a customer with no parameters i'm going to say create a customer with no params and i'm just going to put that at the top here and we're going to say c and underscore is equal to customer.new i'm going to pass in nil so in this case all of the api calls to create objects are going to return a tuple where the first argument or the first object return is the the instance of the object created and the second is an error very standard go stuff so now we can say format.printline for c and just to see kind of like what the id looks like or kind of like roughly what the object looks like and so we see an id here this is the terminal output we see that kind of like just the customer is returned and some general values for what might have been filled in so if we wanted to fetch a single customer later on we could do so using this string id to fetch the customer so let's comment those out and then just say fetch a customer and again we're going to use the same pattern and we're going to say customer dot get and the first argument is that string id for the customer and the second is nil all right again we're going to see the same data come back because this is for the same customer object and so the first the first method that we called here created the customer and then the second is now fetching that customer all right let's uh let's spice things up a bit and create another customer this time with a name and email address so rather than just passing nil in we want to pass some params in so we can do so by creating a new instance of one of these stripe.customer params structs params uh and we're gonna pass in the email like so and now because the the value for the email is a string um the stripe go library expects that we're going to wrap these up with um sort of these stripe.string helper methods here so we're going to say jenny.rosen example.com and we have similar helpers for other primitive types like n64 and bool and there's even like string slices and support for many different helpers for converting from a string into what what the stripe library is expecting so we can pass also a name here so this might be jenny rosen all right so now these params are going to be passed when creating the customer here so we can say customer.new and pass in params and then we'll just format print line of c and in this case we are create a customer with scalar values okay so let's just run that and see what we get and i didn't spell this right and stripe.string okay so this is this should be string stripe.string allows us to pass in a string value i don't know why my hand just types strike okay all right so let's run this again um okay so now we have created a customer object and it has its email address set and also its name set so if we wanted to get a little bit nicer output here we can say c dot name and c dot email and if we print these out then we should see jenny rosen and jenny.rosen at example.com one thing i wanted to call out explicitly is that the stripe api again expects the parameters to be passed as form and coded data in the post body so it's not being sent as json the response we're getting back from the stripe api is json but the request is form encoded is a form encoded string so this is going to end up looking like email equals jenny.rosen at example.com ampersand name equals and then jenny whatever percent 20 rosen right that is the url encoded for or the form encoded string value that will be sent as the request body so the stripe go client library is going to abstract most of this away so you generally don't have to think about it but something i want to keep in mind if you're going to sort of make requests outside of the context of stripe go so that is how we can create a customer with some scalar values some of the scalars except specific enum values so the tax exempt parameter on the customer in particular accepts one of none exempt or reversed let's take a look so params we'll set params equal to this again this time we're going to pass in tax exempt now when there are enum values available you can access them on the stripe package like on the strike package name and so the way that we would pass this tax exempt value is actually stripe.string and then inside of the stripe.stringcall we're going to pass in a call to string and inside of the cult string we're going to pass in customer tax exempt reverse or tax exempt none or tax exempt exempt right so like customer because we're working with the the customer object here's customer params here's customer we're working with the tax exempt property so tax exempt property and then the part that comes after that is sort of the pascal case and aligns with what the name of the object that we're creating is so that's what that looks like i'm just going to collapse all of that back into one line and then we will say c comma underscore is dot new params print line um c dot tax exempt okay we can run that and we will see that the tax it's tax exempt none so if we change this to tax exempt reverse and then run the code again we will see that we get back reverse as the string value so that's how we can work with enums in stripe go all right so let's up the stakes yet again and send some data that's nested inside of a child parameter so here we're going to say params and often a lot of the time you spend crafting your api request is going to be spent on kind of configuring these params objects to have the right like names and values so customer params again and now this time at the top level we're going to pass another scalar value for payment method stripe.string is a pm card visa and we'll come back and talk about what that does in a minute and then we also want to pass invoice settings and here invoice settings itself is a nested object with params so what we can do is we can pass we have to pass another struct value here which is going to be the customer invoice settings param so stripe dot customer invoice settings params now uh this this customer invoice settings params it's fal it's going to follow the same same sort of pattern right where customer this is the resource type invoice settings is the name of the parameter and then params is we're attaching params because the type of that struct which is going to be passed as like the the child of the invoice settings params is um this sort of uh it's a params object so we just we suffix it with params and one of the options for invoice settings is the default uh payment method and here we can say stripe.string pm card visa okay get our commas all right um and this is gonna be like create a customer with nested params and we can say format.printline of c but first we need to create c uh so this is going to be equal to customer.new params all right let's take a look actually let's let's console.log c dot invoice settings just to get a little bit of a closer look so we'll run the code there and we should see the invoice settings object that we get back default payment method that should have the actual payment method there okay cool so we see the id for the payment method that was created so pm card visa is one of the test payment method ids if we pass it at the top level the payment method and inside of the invoice settings default payment method then our resulting test customer can successfully make recurring payments in test mode for a billing subscription and also for other invoices so this is um how we can pass some nested params all right next next up is lists of strings so let's see what that looks like so some parameters except lists of strings when you're creating a customer you can specify a list of preferred locales so this is like maybe the languages that your customer speaks so let's uh let's create a customer with a list of strings and it's going to look like this params again we're going to create a stripe.customerparams here and it will have preferred locales consist of a list of strings so the way that we before we said dot string we passed in sort of the string literal here we want to pass in the string literal for english and spanish and the way that we can kind of like unbox that list is using stripe dot string slice which is going to take in a um strings like this so we can say en and yes so maybe this customer speaks both english and spanish and all right so now we're gonna just create our customer again customer.new params and then we're gonna print that out okay so there we see it english and spanish so that is how we pass a list of strings with stripe go now that we've created several customers let's see how we can update an existing customer the concepts from earlier around creating the params are going to apply but in addition to those params we also need the id of the object that we'd like to update so all objects in the stripe api have these string ids like cuss underscore whatever so a customer is going to start with cuss underscore a payment intent it's going to start with pi underscore when updating the customer we're going to pass this as the first argument and then the second argument is going to be the params object for updating the customer so let's update the email address for a customer so we're going to say you know update the email address for a customer and we want to make our params object which is going to be stripe.customerparams the struct for create an update is the same and here what we want to do is say email is going to be stripe.string jr example.com update call looks like this customer.update we pass in the string id as the first argument and then params as the second argument c dot id and c dot email okay so let's run this and we can see that our customer id was printed and that an email address was printed out but just to show that this is actually updating the customer let's change the email from jr to just jr2 and then run this again and we should see that output reflect the change to the email address but not to the customer id obviously so this does show that we are updating the customer object within stripe so this is how we would make an update request from stripe go with the stripe api as you may expect we can also follow the same pattern for updating these nested objects and nested params so i want to show an example where we have a list of nested objects that we're sending along so in this case we're going to say update customer with nested list of objects or structs or what have you params here is going to be again uh stripe.customer rams and in this case we're going to send invoice settings again customer invoice settings params now this time we are going to pass custom fields with invoice settings so custom fields and custom fields is a list of custom field params so in this case we want to pass in a list of stripe.customer invoice custom field params i'm going to pass in that and then to make it super clear i'm going to pass in extra curly braces here for each sort of like instance of the custom field params and each custom field can have its own name and value a common use case for custom fields was to pass in some tax id information so i'm going to pass in stripe.string and just pass in that it turns out that we recently released some features of the api that allow you to set your tax ids as a merchant in your stripe dashboard and those tax ids can flow through and show up on invoices this is a really common ask for users especially in europe so here we have custom fields we've created a single custom field with the name vat and the value 123 abc and we need a bunch of commas here to make the go linter happy okay so now we're going to say c comma underscore is and again we're going to update the customer and we need to pass in its id first and then the params second okay and then we can just say format dot print line of maybe c dot invoice settings.custom fields let's see if we can print out uh something reasonable with that and we're making requests and we get back that okay so there we go so we had to dereference so that we get back instead of getting back the pointer we get back the actual uh values here so we've got back that and one two three abc which are our our custom fields okay so that is how we can update a customer with a nested list of objects okay next i want to talk about making a get request to fetch a page from the list of customers with the list method so here we're going to say like let's just like fetch a list of customers all right and so we're going to construct a params object and this time it is not a customer params object it is a customer list params params.single we'll set it so that we don't auto paginate through every single customer in the list um auto pagination is default in stripe go next i can say i is equal to customer.list and pass in params now i returns an iterator so i can say 4i.next customer is i.customer format.printline the customer's id i don't know why i don't keep misspelling that okay so we got back the list of customer ids here by default we get 10 per page and again with stripe go if you don't specify single as true then it will the iterator will automatically page for you so stripe yeah stripe go is uh has built in auto pagination super handy for working with lists and doing bulk fetches we have an entire episode dedicated to pagination so if you want to head over and learn more about list endpoints and the parameters for limit ending before starting after all those options are covered in the pagination episode one interesting thing about the customer list endpoint is that it can be filtered based on the date both the date that the customer was created but also the email addresses of the or the email address of the customer copy this comment this out and then i'm going to say filter a list filter the list of customers by email so if i pass in email here as stripe.string of jenny.rosen example.com should get back all the customers that have that email address and i'll print their id and their email so we can see here notice that the ids of each of these customers is a different id but the email address is the same it turns out that in stripe each customer is uniquely identified by its id however multiple customers on the same account can have the same email address so an email address is not a unique identifier for a customer in the stripe api and we in fact can list several customers and filter that list by the email address so this is making a get request to the list endpoint so this was this is going to look something like this so go to v1 customers slash or question mark email equals jenny.rosen example.com and um so this query string parameter this is being serialized as form encoded form encoded query string params and sent to the stripe api as query string parameters with a get request to slash v1 customers returning this list and again by default if you don't specify single equals true this will auto paginate and we'll go to our next topic here occasionally you may want to delete an object so delete expects the id of the object to be deleted so let's delete one of our recently created customers so i'm going to say delete a customer and the way this works is we call customer.dell so c underscore is customer.dell and we pass in the id of the customer we want to delete and no doubt the customer and see we get back so if we run this we will see that we got back what looks like a customer object in reality this is a deleted customer object they're like a little bit of a different type in stripe.go this is kind of just what you can expect to get back is an instance of a customer object it'll have the id set but also have deleted equal to true if we pull up the documentation for the payment intent resource you'll see that there are some additional api methods on the left in addition to the standard crud operations some resources support additional actions also known as custom methods in the case of a payment intent you'll see the confirm capture and cancel methods these work similar to update api calls but use a special api path and perform a specific action on an underlying object when we veer away from the standard create retrieve update delete and list operations the custom method names follow a verb naming convention so for instance we have dispute.close paymentintent.confirm charge.capture etc the client library will expose access to custom methods in a predictable way using a name that matches the verb seen in the api reference so to demonstrate custom methods let's first create then confirm a payment intent so first we'll create a payment intent with just an amount a currency and we'll print out its id so here we're going to say first create a payment intent to confirm later so we're going to say um let's see params is equal to stripe.payment intent params amount is equal to stripe.int 64 and we'll pass in a thousand for ten dollars and the currency is going to be an enum and because it's an enum we can say stripe.string and we have to say string again and then we say stripe.currency because it's a currency enum and then the value we want is usd okay so that should give us the params to create a payment attempt one thing i want to do too is comment out the customer package and comment in the payment intent package and then we want to say um pi is equal to payment intent dot new params print out the pi's id and also let's print its status okay so let's run this so this is all standard stuff we've seen this before we're just passing scalar values in n64 and an enum and we get back a payment intent id this pi underscore this is the id of a payment intent and we see the status is requires payment method by default when you create a payment intent like this it doesn't confirm the payment intent we have to confirm it either client-side or with this optional custom method called confirm which is available and exposed in stripe go as the confirm method so the second thing we're going to do is confirm the payment intent and we can do so with params and this time the type of the params are going to be special so we're going to say stripe dot payment intent confirm params and this is just a set of params that is only used for this confirm method so we're going to say payment method is equal to stripe.string we'll pass in pm card visa again we talked about this a little bit earlier and now we can say pi is equal to payment intent dot confirm and the first argument is the string id for the payment intent this one does not need to have the special stripe.string wrapper the second argument is params so let's actually grab those two okay so we want to see this the id and the status again so we'll run this again and this should confirm the payment intent so any time we veer from those crud methods so create read update delete list dell for delete right we've just we just saw all of those anytime we're viewing from that we're going to use a verb and that verb will be some consistent predictable method name that you can find in the api reference and then should be available in stripe go if it's not first option is to or the first first troubleshooting is to make sure that you have the latest version of stripe go in that the version of stripe go you're using supports that custom method and the second is to make sure that it's spelled right so here is an example of one custom method and how we can use it to confirm a payment attempt which is a special action that we would take on a payment intent some api endpoints are nested under higher level resources so for example when working with a list of lines for an invoice those are accessible through a path which includes the id of the invoice like so sometimes accessing these nested resources requires first fetching an instance of the parent resource in this case an invoice and then second making an api call to list its lines let's take a look next i want to talk about nested service methods or nested endpoints so in order to do this i want to list out the line items on a a given invoice so we're going to talk about a nested service method for line items on invoices so the way that we access a nested service method is by creating some params and as one of those params is going to be the id of the parent resource so here we're going to say the params are stripe.invoiceline list params and they have an id and that id is going to be the string value for the invoice it's going to start with like in underscore and that's going to be the invoice id which is the parent resource but the results of this api request are going to be each of the items that are the line items for that invoice so this this like ultimately results in a request to like v1 invoices slash inxx where that is the the parent resources id slash lines this is another sort of way to make a list request but because it's nested underneath this parent resource we call it a nested service method and so this is how in stripe go you can access and work with those nested service methods so we might do something like params.filters.addfilter and this is a common method for filtering lists and we might say like you know give this list filter this list down to uh five items and then we can say i is the iterator for invoice dot list lines and we pass in params and then we can do you know the same the same action that we did before for our iterator earlier i'm not as worried about getting too many pages this time so we can say line is equal to i dot invoice line and we can just print this out maybe dot id okay and then the other thing is i have to switch these around okay all right so this is our nested service method we're gonna run this code and we should see the ids for the list the line items list ah okay so the the request is failing with a 404 because this invoice does not exist i n underscore does not exist so let's see um so i'm going to use the stripe cli down here just to make a make a call and say stripe invoices list limited to one pipe it to jq give me the data this is just to like get the id of a given invoice so i'll copy that id and paste it in here rather than our placeholder run this code again and we get back the id of an invoice line item so that is the uh the id of the invoice line item there so that's how we work with nested service methods in stripe go thus far our examples have passed data into the client library methods and the client library has form encoded and sent those values to the stripe api either as part of the request body or in the query string params let's turn to passing configuration options in the request headers headers are most commonly used for authentication versioning and stripe connect you'll want to refer to the authentication episode to learn about how api keys are passed or to the versioning episode about how to specify the api version in the headers either globally or per request so the particular use case i want to cover briefly here is for stripe connect connect enables you to build a platform to facilitate payments for other sellers or vendors users connect their stripe account to your stripe account and then you can make api calls on their behalf once connected this works by passing the id of the connected account in the http headers let's take a look at how to pass the connect account id header if we wanted to create a customer on a connected account on a stripe connect account then we might do something like this so let's say create a customer on a connected account so we're going to create params the same way that we would for creating a normal customer on our own account customer params the difference is that we're going to pass in the stripe account id so we're going to say strip.string jenny.rosen at example.com this we've seen before this is just how you create um you know a customer with the scalar value you say customer.new rams format dot print line maybe c dot id and c dot email we also need to switch back to customer up here okay so the trick for passing the connected account id is that this params object has a special method called set stripe account so we can say params.set stripe account and here we want to pass in the value for a stripe account so this string id for this this this connected account is a stripe account that has been authenticated and connected to my stripe account and is uh an account that my platform can facilitate payments on behalf of so if we take a look at what this looks like and run the you know request demo we see the there is a customer id and we see the email address of the customer it turns out this customer id is for a customer that is not on my account it's for a customer that is on this connected stripe account so this is how you pass in the um the stripe account id for connect and by calling setstripe account this will actually be passed in the request headers rather than the body of the request or in the query string param so this is being passed in the request headers as a quick recap in this episode you learn how to make requests to the stripe api to create retrieve update delete and list resources we looked at the api reference documentation covered custom methods nested services and passing request headers for connect thanks so much for watching we'll see in the next one --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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