Useful gem: stripe_event

If you are going to use stripe for payments, you need to set up your webhooks. If you are using rails, the easiest solution I’ve found is stripe_event. This gem mounts a configurable endpoint and takes care of all the authentication you need to receive the webhooks.You then set up configuration in an initializer to receive the various webhooks you want to receive. The type of hooks you want depends on your application, but all the available events are listed here and the stripe support folks are happy to point you toward interesting ones if you approach them with a problem.

You can (and should) test the stripe events by using fixtures and request tests. I found the most difficult part of that testing process to be getting sample data for the json payload. The documentation has some, but you may need to run a sample event through your test dashboard and capture the json via a generic webhook capture. I ended up using this type of puts debugging to help get the json for events:

events.all do |event|
  ## debugging
  puts "xxxdebugging all events"
  puts event.to_s
end

In my experience, we never received enough load to really stress out this gem (I’ve seen maybe 30 requests a minute), but if you plan to have a high webhook load, you may want to do some load testing.

Definitely a gem worth having if you are using stripe.